Exhibition in Progress | Return to the pure realm of the soul and vision

Exhibition Preface

In April in Harbin, lilacs are quietly brewing and blooming in the chilly spring. This northern city soaked in ice and snow is about to witness a pure dialogue about color and the soul - the solo exhibition of Belgian contemporary artist Michel leonardi in Harbin. In this exhibition, we will follow the artist's brush and step into a visual paradise stripped of the hustle and bustle, experiencing the most genuine power of color.

Michel leonardi's creation is a "subtractive art". In this era submerged by a vast array of images, he opts to confront the hustle and bustle of daily vision with the purest colors and minimalist elliptical shapes. On his canvas, there are no complex stories, no carvings of light and shade, nor even any embellishments of texture. Only large areas of monochromatic ellipses float quietly. These soft color blocks are like frozen time capsules, the traces of the artist's daily focused painting in the studio, and also the channel through which he invites viewers to temporarily leave reality and return to their true selves.

If traditional painting is "looking outward at the world", the works of Michel leonardi are a practice of "looking inward at oneself". He cast aside the shackles of social metaphors, historical symbols and daily experiences, and constructed a pure energy field merely with color as the language. Each work in the exhibition hall is an energy source: cobalt blue is as calm as the deep sea, ochre red is as intense as magma, and soft pink is as light as the dawn... These colors are not attached to any cultural symbols (neither the golden hue of imperial power nor the blood-red hue of revolution), but rather the "absolute truth" that the artist captures from his inner intuition. Their existence is merely to awaken the viewer's most primitive perception - when vision is enveloped by the alienated color gamut, we are able to break free from the inertial interpretation mode and relearn to "breathe" with our eyes.

The elliptical shapes that repeatedly appear in the exhibition are just like the gentle barriers set by the artist for this dialogue. These rounded contours dissolve the aggressiveness of the sharp corners and also blur the boundary between the concrete and the abstract. Michel leonardi believes that true art should, as Duchamp said, "put art into life" - when the audience stands in front of the painting, there is no need to ask "What is this?", just feel how the colors penetrate the retina and stir up private ripples in the mind. This might precisely be the most scarce experience for contemporary people: in the precise feeding of algorithms and the deluging of information, regaining a blank space where vision can freely inhabit.

When the lilacs bloom, may this exhibition become a colorful prose poem in the spring of Harbin. Let's temporarily shut down our brains tamed by images and allow Michel leonardi's pure color gamut to take us back to the nascent state of vision - where every touch of color is a gentle gaze cast by the universe.

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