The Interface of Muscle
By Ouksi
The most astonishing characteristic of Xavier Wei’s figure painting is perhaps his rendering of muscle.
There is a series of contrasts in his art. The substantial flesh of his figures is extremely carnal and erogenous, but their faces always emanate a hue of calm and ease. Those gestures, slightly or heavily distorted, demonstrate simultaneously the powerfulness and flaccidity of muscles, of the will to move muscles. Floating on a monochrome background, those bulky bodies seem to live in an Edenic space, where the gravity is only half of the Earth’s. All these contrasts give the impression of a violent tenderness, which traverses Wei’s entire work.
For those who see his painting for the first time, this experience must be rather disconcerting than comfortable. Those amiable figures on canvas, after first giving us a greeting smile, suddenly pop out and attack us with their nudity, force us to confront our own desire, sexuality, gender, aging, embarrassment, in one word, our insecurity of the body. Wei exacerbates further the confusion by giving us a harmonious scene with fairy-tale aura, and our aesthetic, shaken up by clashes of feelings, is banished into suspension. This is exactly the artist’s prowess.
If modern painting has liberated the body from realism, then, apparently, Wei prefers to take the side of classicism. Just like his Renaissance predecessors who rediscovered the value of human body, he has also found a way to express himself in the bodies of his friends. His devotion to the body and especially the muscle is sacerdotal, which is why this work frequently reminds us of religious painting and byzantine icons. However, most religions are not comfortable with the flesh, and unfortunately, we are no better than the religions we created. The tricky point here is how to grant the flesh a spiritual dimension, since it is also a creation of nature.
Muscle is a medium, a medium that conveys the will to movement. It also serves as an interface between the body and the environment, the concrete and the aerial, the carnal and the spiritual. As a fundamental tissue of the body, muscle is a force field that creates a narrative of its own by continuously generating dramatic tension. Starting from its status quo, we can rebuild its history and predict its next move.
Wei’s seemingly peaceful, cozy, or pastoral scenes are actually composed of three organic plans: the main plan occupied by the muscle, the inside plan revealed by the eyes, and the outside plan of background.
The main plan is an exhibition of muscles: muscles of eyelid, cheek, chin, neck, shoulder, arm, finger, chest, abdomen, genital, thigh, calf, foot, toe…. Every piece of muscle tells its own tumultuous story. How is it constituted, used, and trained? Why is it deformed? What did it suffer? How does it feel? What does it desire? Muscle is a person in Wei’s art. Interestingly enough, the word muscle is derived from the Latin musculus meaning “small mouse”. Without these bumping mice under the skin, his painting won’t come into existence.
Wei is a sensualist as well as sensationalist; he knows how to stir up our curiosity. Sometimes, the muscles are not directly presented to us but hidden under the clothes. This is the technique of striptease, which only entices us more to imagine what is under the clothes, to ponder over the meaning of the covering (Please Tell Me a Story, Red Dress and White Vest, Striped Pants, etc.). Sometimes, the muscles of the trunk lose desirability entirely and disappear under the clothing. Alternately, the muscles of face or hand rise to eminence and play the leading role of narrator (C&L, Madame Pideri).
The inside plan revealed by the eyes is another signature of Wei’s painting. Just like the term “window of the soul” suggests, the eyes of the figure on canvas can always offer us further information on his/her inner life, just like a peep show.
It is not a coincidence that the left and right eyes of the same person are never of the same form and size; they are all crossed eyes or victims of strabismus. This lack of eye-muscles’ coordination is actually a detour, a detour to a better 3D viewing experience. In order to get a focused and pristine image of the figure, we the viewers need to correct his or her eye-muscles’ coordination by ourselves. In so doing, our eyes become the perfect 3D glasses. This is in fact a cubistic pleasure.
On the outside plan of background there are two distinctive styles: minimalism and the “fancy garden”.
The background in the indoor scene paintings is often minimalistic, reduced to a gradient monochrome field and functioning as a colorful backlight. However, there is still something significant to be identified: a settee, a chair, a stool, a swing, a bed, a curtain etc. These objects are not only decoration but also anchorages for the body, without which the body would dangle in the air. A dangling figure à la Chagall is of course not illegal, especially in modern painting, but it somehow contradicts Wei’s aesthetic of massive body and his gravitational system.
On the other hand, his outdoor scene paintings present a view of some fancy garden with exuberant plants and grasses (Please tell me a story, The Women Woods, Wild Night). These pictures are mostly group portraits imbued with a mythological aura, and often their titles could be used directly as psychoanalytic metaphors.
No matter on which background, the body never cast a real heavy shadow on the background; at the most there is only a thin dark atmosphere around the body to indicate the direction of light. On the contrary, the muscles of the body are always painted in chiaroscuro. This contrast between the minimal shadow around the body and the stark shadow on the body yields an effect of lightness, which levitates the monumental body off the ground.
In Wei’s recent work, lightness seems to be a topic of concern. Besides the floating body, his muscled bears also tend to be more and more elongated and slender, almost as graceful as swimming frogs. Svelte is the new sexy. These floating muscular figures bear witness to the evolution of his aesthetic and artistic instinct. After all, art is never an affair of beauty, but of questioning what beauty is.