亮色新古街 2017

This painting, 亮色新古街, is built from bright colours laid on with thick impasto, probably with a palette knife. It’s an exercise in seeing how much abstract expressionism you can get away with, while still suggesting a street scene. There’s a push-pull between the marks and the subject matter, because when you look closely, you can see that each dash and stroke has been thoughtfully placed, not randomly. The overall effect makes me think of an early Van Gogh, someone like, say, Kees Van Dongen. Both artists used a similar technique, capturing light and atmosphere with thick brushstrokes of oil paint. The way the brushstrokes build up texture, particularly on the rooftops, gives the painting a tactile quality. You can almost feel the weight of the paint, and that feeling gives the painting its own peculiar reality. It's as if Wang Xin-Fu isn't just showing us a street, but also how he's constructed his experience of it, one loaded brushstroke at a time.