“The way to understand painting is through memory and feeling. The most important thing is to feel life. It is not about culture itself, or explicit symbols.”
—Zhang Enli
Between 2003 and the 2010s, Zhang Enli began to depict everyday objects that used ‘pure blocks of colour, line, and shape as a means of expression.’ i Using such paintings to reflect the outside world, Zhang’s works may initially appear to be prosaic and simple documentations of contemporary life, rendered beautifully and plainly in his signature gouache-like technique. And yet, his art focuses on the nuances extant in the things he selects, stripping them of meaning, and then rendered into pictorial modes that entirely transform his original source imagery. Commenting on such pieces, art historian Monica Dematté mused, ‘I am wondering whether I should consider these works figurative or abstract. Although our eye can recognise scissors, an empty cigarette box, or a tube of acrylic paint, we realise that they have lost their meanings purely as objects to acquire meanings that are highly pictorial…It is as if the limited symbolic value of an everyday object could convince the common viewer, who is always ready to grab stale iconographies and to look for narration or ideology, that the painting’s surface is valid in itself.’ ii In his deconstruction of assorted ephemera, Zhang’s paintings seek to find joy in the subtleties of all the miscellany that populate his canvases. In his treatment of Two Colour Tubes, so purposeful and yet casual; floating nondescriptly, and yet almost unrecognisable in its exaggerated immense size, one comes to understand that the unassuming tube should rather ‘be filled with “something” that goes “beyond reality” to which the painter refers: a mood, a feeling, a vision, which are, nonetheless, undefined and un-definable once and for all.’ iii Entirely open to interpretation, the beauty in Zhang’s oeuvre lies in its simplicity and elegant painterly surface, as the quotidian becomes something to behold.
“Zhang Enli starts his pursuit of the shapeless on the canvas with the use of boxes, leather tubes, twigs, and lines to capture the intangible again and again…From the beginning of his career, Zhang Enli has felt the presence of the intangible. In his paintings, a certain burst of energy always wants to be seen, demanding a form from the canvas.”
—Shen Qilan, quoted within ‘The Flowing Mantle: on the Portraits by Zhang Enli’