Ruben Pang – Venusian Skies
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Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the Singaporean artist Ruben Pang’s new solo exhibition, set up in both our Lugano galleries!
Born in 1990 in Singapore, Ruben Pang graduated at Lasalle College of the Arts, with a Diploma in Fine Arts and he currently lives and works between Singapore and Sardinia.
Entitled Venusian Skies, the exhibition will present Pang's latest creations, in which he invites us to lose ourselves in a sort of a long and distant journey, with paintings inspired by a new surreal vision that plays with the movement and smoothness of the surface. Using a combination of oils, alkyds and acrylics, he paints, scratches and erases his paintings using brushes, hands, palette knives and sandpaper, revealing layers of color that reflect projections of his psyche. Pang prefers aluminum panels as its rigidity reflects and captures the nuances of each moment and gesture in a way which canvas cannot. Its durability allows greater freedom to transform the image as it develops. The technique used to spread the color does not aim to make a dough or to give a sense of three-dimensionality, but rather the color and the representation help to unfold the images.
Chance is an important part of creation. I embrace processes which accommodate spontaneity, accidents, and conflict. I recognize that all artists are multidimensional, and that we will go through phases where we work in distilled, capillaric ways and other times rhizomatic.
I am drawn to the extremes of the spectrums within painting, to use the medium to its strengths and take it to places it doesn't want to go, be it abstract or figurative.
Painting is the mirror and agent of metamorphosis.
To me, any resonance beneath the surface of a painting that is developed over a series of choices is naturally autobiographical. I also believe that the artist’s psyche is always ahead of consciousness and that my most honest paintings aren’t afraid to show my vulnerabilities alongside my strengths. Anxiety is potency, and it’s synthesis can be used to overcome the inertia of the blank surface.
I am driven by that which is always slightly out of reach and enrich myself through technical curiosity, a sensitive touch and the humility to go back to basic rudiments.
What has become most poignant to me recently is the need to lose self-created barriers between introversion and extroversion, self-consciousness and self-awareness, fast and slow thinking. I paint what occurs in my life, and believe that no subject matter should be taboo. I subscribe to the metaphor of harmony and dissonance; harmony aspires to the divine but could be authoritarian, while dissonance can be unnerving while it celebrates the grit of humanity. Underneath these dualities, art is always optimistic by opposing adamantine logic; that one can behold the universe by going within.
- Ruben Pang
