Li Songsong (previously) has long centered his practice around translating archival imagery, whether it be a portrait printed in a newspaper or still from a film. The Chinese artist is broadly interested in the ways that memories morph over time and how, when we’re reflecting on a moment well in the past, our clarity over the particulars can be hazy.
His new body of work, History Painting, takes a similar technical approach, although rather than interpret a specific scene, Li ventures into the abstract. Wide, impasto layers of oil paint cloak the large-scale canvas, creating a cacophony of color and texture that seems to swell upward while simultaneously pulling downward. As a filmed studio visit shows, the artist works from top down, adding one thick mark atop another in a sort of grid.
Pace Gallery, which represents Li, shares that History Painting reflects more on his relationship to the medium than any specific visual source, although, given his past work, it’s difficult not to try to find definition within the composition. The clustered ridges of paint, for example, might evoke bodies huddled together in mass, their backs to the viewer as they move toward an unknown destination. For Li, these brushstrokes, while abstract, do retain a sense of action and autonomy, and he describes them as “agentive and idiosyncratic” even as they’re covered again and again.
History Painting is on view through December 20 in New York.
