ART MATTERS by Enzo Marra

This month I will continue to explore approaches and artworks of local artists who actively employ their days in creativity, and who are hopefully still finding comfort in their needed obsessions in these dark days.

The ability for the drawn and painted act to allow us to see what is truly important in our usually hectic lives, a wordless communication that is even more important now that it has been denied to us.

I’m very happy to introduce you to another Brighton-based artist, Dawei Zhang, who explores the human condition via painted and drawn figurative imagery, all executed from his studio based at Phoenix Brighton. His imagery intrinsically connected with themes of friendship, love, seduction, fragility. His friends and family visible in touching evocations, which slowly unfurl as their cautious journey progresses from initial idea to finished set aside image. The emotive ties that bind us together, keep us close, draw us together, remind us of what is important to us, are only too visible in his works and remind us of the relationships which we are missing, we are hoping to again be able to properly take part in, the lives we used to live, would dearly love to be able to live again.

Having first seen his works too many years ago during an Open House exhibition, and having been genuinely impressed, I have had the luxury of seeing them develop from an acutely textural all prima imagery with a genuinely gestural feel through to their more subtle and more washily applied contemporary works. His use of charcoal in his drawn evocations equally as powerful in their renditions of portraiture and part and full figures, each graduated in all scales of grey to achieve their photographic inspired yet equally distinctive hard fought effects. Having previously been drawn by him a number of times, I have seen how he can capture an individual’s personality, the glint in their eye, the almost invisible things that make them into a true likeness, that can make you recognise things about yourself you hadn’t noticed previously. The way he can sometimes use pigment in his paintings can be much more vivid, yet this potent palette doesn’t take away from the subject matter that it is utilised towards.

His works have been exhibited at the National Open Art Competition; I hope you will be able to see more of them locally and nationally once a new normality returns. The opportunity to be able to see such artworks face to face in a real space, allowing us a truer connection with them, a form of communication that a screen can never mimic or adequately convey. The need to see and be affected by imagery is a luxury I truly miss, an experience I will relish when gallery doors open wide and allow me back in.