PARIS.- Lee Ufan has been following his own path for more than six decades, uninterested by the successive obsessions of his fellow contemporary artists. From his very first works, a few foundational principles were established and have remained unchanged since. In sculpture: the simplicity of the volumes and the use of few materials, natural or human, such as eroded rocks, metal plates, or glass. In painting: the simplicity of the shapes, laid down and repeated on the canvas, of which, for a long time, the artist used only a narrow selection of colours. In a world saturated with images of all origins that inspire mistrust, this restriction of means is to visual arts what a retreat was in the past to ordinary life: a deliberate break and the creation of a place for reflection, silence and contemplation. In him, there is something of the hermit and the poet. In his writings, this inner necessity is immediately perceptible, as much as the range of his philosophical references.

Those lines could have been written a long time ago, at the time of the series From Point and From Line, for these are the fundamental characteristics of his oeuvre. But with the first Correspondances, from 1991-1992, Lee Ufan’s painting began to change. Though the canvas remains white, the forms have become larger and denser. The brushes deposit oblong touches, fringed at times with a light foam of paint. From edge to edge, they offer variations of greys, from the very dark to the almost transparent. Sometimes a single shape is placed at the centre of the canvas. Sometimes there are two, three or more, spread out on the surface. In that case, their situations in relation to one another generate sensations of space and movement, as at the time of his series From Winds and With Winds, but with other pictorial solutions, more restrained. That is the case with the series Dialogue, whether the paint is on the canvas or on the wall.

The most recent works, of which many are called Response, are not made differently: one or several separated forms on white— however, these ones welcome colour. In the same way as the grey moved from darkness to paleness, the blue and the red, in their whole intensity at the centre of the form, are absorbed by the darkness on one edge and by the light on the opposite edge. The colour disappears, swallowed by a progressive darkening that almost turns into black and, symmetrically, is eaten up by a whiteness increasingly blinding. Whether the shape is vertical or horizontal, the progression from light to darkness inexorably takes place. When it comes closer, the eye perceives the undulatory movements of the touch that accentuate the sensation of life. Neither the colour nor the form is stable, and nor is the space, for its frontal aspect is disturbed by that chromatic phenomenon.

Lee Ufan finds here, again and in a different manner than previously, how to mark and make perceptible the passing of time. There is the time of the artist, that of pictorial creation, and its realisation that leaves its light traces in the movements of the colour, which are those of the hand and the wrist of the painter. There is the time of the viewer, whose gaze follows those vibrant lines along chromatic shifts, and at that moment, exits the ordinary temporality of daily life, that of our oppressive present—a moment of contemplation that makes us more intensely alive. “The life of a work of art, the artist wrote in 2012, is a transcendent sensation. That life weaved by the artwork is deeply embedded in the order and complex principle of repetition that connects it to the universe, the waves and breaths. That is what’s beyond the self, other, and has to do with universal life.”

The art in this exhibition, intensely alive, reveals surprising recent paintings, acrylics, and watercolours. The shapes, with their changing colours, seem to glide against each other and, at times, come together in convergence. Simultaneously, the colour scheme contains shades previously missing, mineral or marine. Lee Ufan’s work is, once again, heading in a new direction.

— Philippe Dagen