Cassina Projects is pleased to present Forking Passage, Chinese artist Sihan Guo (*2000) debut solo show. Encompassing Guo’s most recent body of work, the exhibition traces an idea of painting as radical act of resistance challenging conventional notions of symmetry, harmony and order.
Plain white walls accommodate an ensemble of twelve oil paintings on wood panel, disorienting in their palpable tension between expressiveness and finitude.
Hazy landscape outlines and evanescent silhouettes crop up, weaved by dripping and swirling across the pictorial plane. Painstakingly worked upon, the surfaces brim with action. Their calibrated push and pull render the impact of a sudden force unleashed into a controlled explosion, manned chaos ruled by unpredictability.
Personal narrative and collective experience collapse into nebulous deflagrations as Guo’s abstract practice eschews any concrete references or derived citations in favour of instinctive, impromptu reflex. No preparatory sketch prefigures the composition that surface. A sense of muffled urgency haloes.
Pivotal to Guo’s process-based painting are the conceptual gestures of erosion and fragmentation that decode the post-contemporary delusions. Her technique, while unearthing the randomness inherent to her chosen material, provides the theoretic framework to her visual language that flirts with deconstructivism.
A patina of dystopic delusion lingers. These pieces, as if fragments/transcriptions/screens of inner realms, map out mercurial arenas recasting the perpetual cycle of revelation and concealment.