Kevin Yu the Nymphéas

To reconcile geometrical art and lyric abstraction

What does it occur when one wants to reconcile geometrical art and lyric abstraction? What to wait of an artist who despizing borders mixes freedom with the gesture and the mathematical rigour? Can one paint while claiming himself at the same time of Pollock and Mondrian? Kevin Yu punctuates his fabrics of squares white or red and small photographs. The fabrics of its last exposure have as a title “Oils on fabric and joining 2006”. It connects the pure abstraction of painting and a certain reality of the image. It is what can make say that it connects two worlds inconcilable. By an English first name, imposed by the school, and a Chinese patronym, Yu Chen Feng says Kevin Yu, born in Taiwan in 1956, was already at the borders of two civilizations. On fabric or wood, it works in the thousand-year-old tradition of the superposition of the lacquers and the fulgurance of the gesture hundred times repeated until the perfection. Only one blow of brush and the silhouette is registered on the roller which is held at the time of the great ceremonies. The feature becomes landscape, breath and force contained. Raised in the tradition confucéenne, Kevin Yu does not escape the attraction from the Occident, it unloads in Paris in 1981 without knowing a word of French and discovers finally the masterpieces of the large Masters of which it knew only reproductions. It is grabbed by the city. It invents a work where on the filigree of a gestural painting the fragments of another world are grafted, photographic squares, windows of the future open on a reducing past where the memory dissolves in the fulgurating space of the moment.
There remains very insulated in a world where only exists painting where he distils year after year the emotions which crosses it. The contrast which it saw with the daily newspaper between Far East and France, it endeavours to integrate it in its pictorial universe, reflection of its internal conflicts in abstract fabrics by a juxtaposition of surfaces and matters where a universe is redefined. Successive layers, tumultuous sedimentations, cover the fabric in the full movement with gestural controlled by a geometry as rigorous as that of Mondrian where spaces are superimposed as in the fabrics of Cézanne whose it recognizes the influence explicitly.

Born in 1956 in Taiwan, Kevin Yu unloads in Paris without knowing a word of French, it speaks Chinese and knows a little English. This world, our world, it discovers it by the image, its place of predilection becomes Louvre where it is impregnated with all the traditional ones that it knew hitherto only by more or less good reproductions and some too rare exposures.

Kevin Yu punctuates his fabrics of squares white or red. Starting from a painting of the vacuum, it seeks the origin, creation, frangible joint; a connection between Chinese traditional painting and the modernism of the Western abstraction… of the bottom of its major blacks emerges a sky of ideas to cutting as subtle as the mountains of Guilin in against day of a raising sun. The pictorial world of Kevin Yu was always controlled by a paramount sign which moves the center of it, initially silhouette, then house. In its recent works the references to the mother and time multiply like if in its fabrics the dream of a reconciliation between here and elsewhere, the past and the present became finally reality. Kevin Yu perceives his pictorial work like a private diary, nonnarrative. He opens a new prospect with the spirit for geometry in lyricism selected for his fabrics.

Lélia Mordoch Décembre 1998