The Heinzer Reszler Gallery is pleased to announce Mingjun Luo’s first exhibition at its gallery. The exhibition Under The Sky, which occupies the ground floor of the gallery, consists of a new series of clouds. The basement will display older pieces with diverse techniques such as charcoal, pencil or watercolour. “In this not only intercultural but also intermedia study, Mingjun Luo’s clouds constitute a significant step, an astonishing zero degree of simplicity and evidence. These clouds are not a tropme l’oeil; they are not illusory, due to the persistent presence of the support – a raw, unprepared canvas; they contain no symbolic meanings, no references to the beyond, just the minimum amount of very diluted white paint; in short, a nothingness, just a paint effect, and I'd even say a paradoxical erasure of paint. […] While they draw on certain aspects of classical Chinese painting, Mingjun Luo’s clouds certainly do not fall within the traditional landscape tradition, one of the main motifs of which is a mountain shrouded in mist or clouds. “Since clouds don't have a fixed shape, from the Chinese point of view they are seen as a particularly powerful embodiment of the changes at work in the universe in perpetual motion, as the Chinese perceive it.” Each landscape is an emanation of this philosophy of relationships, the circulation between yin and yang. For traditional Chinese painters, the cloud cannot be considered by itself – but Mingjun Luo does precisely this by placing it in the centre of her compositions, without mountains that it can conceal and/or reveal. The cloud is, however, “posed” on the raw cotton, its random shape is inscribed in the fine orthogonal frame of the canvas, soaking this plant-based medium with pigments and oil, thus perfectly symbolising the dialectic of heaven and earth. The void is more than an unfinished area; it becomes a background offering availability. Just as the void can make a shape appear (or the opposite of a shape – an ephemeral cloud), the paper roll appearing in this void has the potential to carry text or images. ”

Bernard Fibicher