FUSION OF IDEAS
He is the greatest artist who has embodied in the sum of his works the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
John Ruskin, British writer and art critic
Oriental arts have a poetics that contains important aesthetic differences from Occidental arts due to the historic discourse that has separated both cultures. Keeping this factor in mind, the new Chinese generations are availing of their vast historic memory packed with beauty and tradition to combine it with the most revealing artistic discourse of the West.
The result, as we can see in the work of Wang Xieda, is a harmonious poetics, of extraordinary creativity, because, both in his sculptures and in his paintings, he maintains the keys of a millenary culture intermingled with the most absolutely contemporary trends from the West, which makes his works especially attractive and suggestive.
An overview of Wang Xieda’s artistic production permits us to appreciate the social and cultural richness thatChinapossesses, a veritable laboratory for the study and analysis of new trends. From the keen, colourful and gestural ancestral eye, they have gone to visual arts that break away from the figurative tradition with the frames and limits of artistic structures and now delve into the conceptual by means of innovative techniques. However, we can see how Wang Xieda achieves a balance between both poles by combining the classical ink-and-paper techniques of the traditional calligraphic arts with a sculptural abstraction reminiscent of the avant-gardes of the West.
In this fusion of artistic ideas that Wang Xieda puts into practice, we can catch a glimpse of a direct relationship with great contemporary artists of the Occident like Giacometti or David Smith but we can also see that there is a close connection with a 4th century master of calligraphy like Wang Xizhi. With his work we could say he comes close to a Platonism that firmly seeks to achieve a dimension where pure ideas reside. Furthermore, in his syntactic reductionism a clear minimalism is symbolised since his works reproduce compositions that stand out in space thanks to an equilibrium of simple geometric lines, randomly juxtaposed, that form in the air a graphic poem, calligrams at the service of nature.
Therefore sculpture for Xieda is a sort of drawing in space and a release of creative energy. His abstract manifestations undoubtedly epitomise experience, loaded with metaphors inspired by consciousness of the human being, whence he addresses social reality in its immediacy.
The influential American critic Clement Greenberg said that for Modernist sculpture to exist it had to have a pictorialist character. It must renounce mass and weightiness, and be light, imaginative, expansive, conceived in visual terms. Wang Xieda embodies these qualities; taking inspiration from the spatial drawings of the classical masters of the East and the West he produces a sculpture with an emotive, imaginative, spontaneous dimension.
For that reason, his creation represents a permanent dialogue between sculpture and drawing. An exchange of ideas that flow reciprocally from one extreme to the other and the artist’s own personality is intertwined. His drawings could be said to be sketches for sculpture and vice versa.
Thus at the IVAM we are setting up this new exhibition that reinforces the links that join us to China, which, apart from enjoying solid economic development, fortunately offers a very meaningful parallelism in the field of art.
In this way, the exchange between our artists and their most outstanding creators, Wang Xieda among them, implies a meeting of artistic languages from lands so far apart and, at the same time, by importing and exporting art, leads to a greater knowledge of the artistic aesthetics that defines both continents.
Consuelo Císcar Casabán
Director of the IVAM