YI-CHIAO CHEN
ARTIST
"My works explore the ideas behind the relationship between human and natural aspects of consciousness", Yichiao Chen explains. Yichiao is one of those artists who experiment with different tools: from paintings and photography to installation and video, and does so by combining abstract and figurative and exploring themes such as mother and child, natural elements, energy and personal emotions. Her art is, in fact, personal and universal at the same time; a moment of reflection where her own history and emotions interlace with energy and with others' stories and emotions. If, in her figurative works, the artist refers to a physical and recognisable reality that the viewers can easily refer to, her abstract series, on the other hand, is much more complex to understand, since it does not represent something physically real. Here, the surface is colours and nothing else: no shapes, no forms, no recognisable lines, so that it is impossible for the viewer to find a concrete meaning. Inspired by Renoir and Kandinsky, Yichiao explores and experiments with colours, changes of light, shadow and tones by expressing their rhythm on canvas. The painting "The blue of outfall" is part of her abstract series. Here, variations of blue dance and interweave with each other: there is nothing concrete, just light and darker tones of blue that fill the empty. canvas. However, surrounded by an immense and dense blue universe, nothing becomes everything: the painting manages to capture the viewers' eyes, hearts and souls just after the first sight. The sinuous and rounded brushstrokes make the image look like a wave swept by the wind or the texture of a cloth's soft drapery. The flow and the variations of the blue acquire a life of their own, where the space of light and shadow interlock: here, you can see a blue of serenity and tranquillity, a blue of freedom, a blue of perseverance and a blue of dream. "The blue of outfall" is just like Kandinsky said: "[it] is born from the "artist": a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being". 165 Art Curator Martina Lattuca