Malaysian artist Eric Chan has tried something entirely new for his third solo exhibition with the Chan Hampe gallery in Singapore.“in-DEFINITE DEFIANCE” presents a series of paintings of serene landscapes, rendered in muted earth tones, surrounded by thick blocks of color drawn from the same restrained palette.In a work like “Existence,” 2016, for example, a mountain-scape reminiscent of a Chinese ink painting occupies most of the bottom of the canvas, while a giant block of dark brown occupies the top. The mountain fades to white on one side, like a photocopy of an image pulled off the Xerox machine too soon. The collective effect highlights the artificiality of what would otherwise appear a natural scene of a mountain.This radically stripped down aesthetic is in stark contrast with the style on display in Chan’s last show at Chan Hampe, which featured visually super-concentrated paintings like “Look,” 2014. That work has a similar composition to “Existence,” with one side of the canvas painted black and the other side painted with a close-up portrait of an unknown woman. In the earlier work, however, the two sides of the painting are linked by a large purple plant with a thorny stem, which appears to invade the space of the canvas.Chan’s new works remove this sort of maximalist addition, a change of pace from what the gallery calls Chan’s “natural instinct for heavily loaded compositions.”The artist says that he created the paintings in “in-DEFINITE DEFIANCE” by taking “a step back” to “focus on the composition using very specific imagery, and push myself out of my comfort zone.” What this means for future exhibitions is unclear. But it has made for a strikingly different show for the artist in 2016.“in-DEFINITE DEFIANCE” runs April 22-May 8 at Chan Hampe Galleries in Singapore.
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