嘉陵江上的碎石滩 2020

Wang Xinfu's "Gravel Beach on the Jialing River" is a landscape made with thick, confident strokes of oil paint. It's like Xinfu is wrestling with the very stuff of the world! I love how the texture of the paint mimics the roughness of the rocks and the movement of the water. There's this one spot, right in the center, where the yellow and brown paint is swirled together like a tiny Van Gogh sky – it’s a microcosm of the whole painting. It’s like the painting is building itself, layer by layer. It makes me think of Guston's late work, where the act of painting becomes a way of thinking through the world. Like Guston, Xinfu isn't trying to trick us into believing we're looking at a real place, he's letting us in on the process, the messy, beautiful struggle to make sense of it all.