“The touch of the eye” as a visual practice of painting

A brief introduction to GuoZhenyu’s work

Sun Lei

GuoZhenyu’s painting ensconces a kind of visual perception through bodily sensations, which can touch the emotions, content, form and even the languages related to the artwork. 

Large numbers of GuoZhenyu’s paintings are filled with disaster awareness and concerns about the fate of mankind. In a reality that is full of unpredictable crises: genomics, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, etc., there must be a consciousness of the disaster, which must be not only emotional and spiritual but also physical. GuoZhenyu takes this sensibility as the basepoint to create the painting and toconstruct a textured world full of life expression. The artist stateda clear attitude: To enter the dark place of life; to search for the hidden clue and the “shadow” survival mode. 

For GuoZhenyu, Life is a mechanism that is composed of contradictions. Therefore, there are contradictions within the existence itself. That is to say, how to represent the complexity and contradictionis the same as how to convey the tangibility of one’s self-existence.  His painting is a way of constructing his self-reality. Only this touch of the “reality” through the paintingwill allow the audience to open up their inner world and resonate with the artwork. 

Instead of giving way for reconciliation, Zhengyu seeks for a battling relationship that refuses to compromise and cross-references each other. Therefore, he knows how to keep this struggle witha persistent effect.To maintain the sharp sense of strangeness and pain is a direct way to feel the existence of life. Therefore, in Zhenyu’s paintings, we can always see the confrontation between positive and negative, expression and reason, the language of painting and the texture of the material, etc. This confrontation reinforces the life experience within the content of thepaintingso much that while we are facing the visible passion in his work, we also have to examine thedescribable feeling through the art. Simply put, his painting forces us to place our understandings about the existence of life into the system of contradictions that he expressed; to disclose our emotions through this mutually-exclusive form of struggle. 

GuoZhenyu has a whole set of themethods for burning:  toallow himself to enter into the frames. When all the trivial of life come into the flames of his emotions, thoughts and his language, everything will be touched by the blaze and reveal the essence of the fact. In another word, everything will be extracted by the burning. In his mind, the abstraction is a detachment through fire, a fundamentalstate or attitude.  

GuoZhenyu’s painting attempts to impose upon the eye a tactile, haptic function to examine how the spontaneous passionis converted intoacognitivepassion.  At this moment, the touch becomes a way of thinking; the sense of touch becomes the thought itself. That is, GuoZhenyu is trying to think in a tactile dimension on how to represent the passion of thoughts. 

In essence, GuoZhenyu’schoice of the “ruins” is not only a reflectionon the reality but more importantly a decision on the nature of “presence” The “ruins”is not only his judgment but also his state of mind, a tragic consciousness of the life, a deep-rooted attitude. 

All in all, Guo’s painting offers us a common-sense grammar for the present tense. In particular, he pays more attention to the touch of the eye,and from here he forms the attitude towards the present: The reality is the ultimate strength of any art. That is his touch of the eye.