Sex. How it is portrayed in art (or its absence) tells us a lot about a society. Ancient Roman art was filled with heroic nudity and matter-of-fact sexual encounters of all types, presented without disdain or editorial commentary. It was just another facet of earthly existence. In Early Medieval western art, there was always a proper distance between clothed male and female figures, the nude body only portrayed when experiencing the tortures of hell. Eve, the first woman and temptress that brought original sin to mankind was high on the moral agenda, her naked body served as a warning against lust. Socialist realism portrayed men and women as equals, working together to build a Maoist future – arm outstretched with a rifle but never an arm outstretched in loving embrace. The Liberation was reshaping a crumbling hierarchical society.
In a similar way, the paintings of Wang Tao tell us a lot about our post millennial existence. The paintings on the surface are about sex – pre and post; but they are not sexy. There are naked couples, but they totally lack intimacy. It is a painful critique. Shadows, tinged with violet come between the pinky fleshed figures. No buff males or lithe females here, but a little pudgy, a little soft, and a little saggy these mundane figures inhabit their own little world and thoughts, a little uncomfortable in their own skin.
A rumpled mattress, a la Caravaggio, appears in #67 (the paintings in the Irrelevance Humanity series carry numbers instead of names). But instead of a slightly inebriated Bacchus with his arm extended offering a shaky vessel of wine (and himself) a female nude sits, head down, hair covering her face. Her pinky flesh casting hard shadows from an unseen light bulb. A male figure looms in the foreground in deep shadow. His eyes cast aside, cigarette hanging from his lips, the cell phone clutched in his hands sheds feeble illumination on his naked torso. The set up is for intimacy, but there is no eroticism here - only a sense of distraction.
Wang Tao's palette is limited. Blacks, grays, pinks and purples predominate. With rich, painterly brush strokes Wang builds a sense of claustrophobic atmosphere around his actors. Periodically there are flashes of intense and thoughtful color relationships worthy of Bonnard and Matisse. Bonnard again comes to mind with the set up of a female nude reclining in a bathtub, but it is not the the light of 20th century south of France we see, it is the atmosphere of 21st century Beijing tinged with coal dust. Wang Tao's imagery is not bleak, though. A genuine and palpable empathy comes through as we watch these characters negotiate their fragile existence. The presence of the ubiquitous cell phone suggests like Plato's allegory of the Cave, humanity has come to believe that the shadows cast on the walls of the cave, or in this case, projected on the screen of a cell phone, are more real and accessible than physical reality.
It is neo-exhistentialism at work, reflecting the ennui of our technology based life.
Christopher Pelley
Shangyuan Art Museum 2014
