Oil, Acrylic, and Egg Tempera Through the Works of Cao Jigang
Oil, Acrylic, and Egg Tempera. Each has an emotional temperature, its own language of mark-making, its own interactions with light. I was made aware of this when I was charged with the project: the exhibition Skypath, for the renowned Chinese artist Cao Jigang. Skypath was the first ever solo exhibition held by Cao in the United Kingdom. Looking at his trajectory, from oil to pencil to Acrylic to Egg Tempera, to me, this has been a comparative analysis on the role of medium in altering our observation of the natural world.
Oil paint has the almost alchemical property of recreating how light really behaves in nature. Its slow-drying nature allows colours to be corrected for days or even weeks, which makes it possible to create the soft, graded transitions between colors that give landscapes the effect of breathing. When Cao depicted the Great Wall in its ruined state, the light in her painting had the quality of radiating from within itself, rather than simply falling on its surface, because of the nature of the medium she used. The forgiving nature of oil paint makes it well suited to recreating the atmospheric effects of mist caressing old stone, where the weight of history seems to hang in the air.
Acrylic paint functions within a completely different emotional register. Where oil whispers, acrylic shouts. Its quick-drying quality along with its plastic polymer base call for firm and certain mark-making. Backtracking is not allowed, no soft blending, nor second guesses. When Cao turned to acrylic for the mountainous landscapes, the nature of the medium merged with the dramatic intensity of the work itself. This was absolutely of acrylic: those blacks like jet matter that can absorb light completely, contrasting against whites so bright they practically vibrate.
But egg tempera has an immediacy and delicacy that modern mediums can hardly approximate. The way that tempera sits on the surface-like some skin, never sinking in like oil, never setting-up the plastic barrier of acrylic-sets up a unique visual texture that seems to hold light differently than any other painterly medium.
The characteristics of the tempera paint become the object of meditation in Cao's minimalist landscapes. The eventual hairline fractures which develop in tempera paint aren't defects. They're characteristics which express the fragility of our relation to nature. There is a quality of the painting surface which is like jade, the most cherished material in Chinese aesthetic traditions.
Secondly, the course of Cao Jigang’s career, and the mediums which the artist has explored, can be explained by the obvious fact that one simply cannot paint certain subjects in all mediums. There appear to be certain subjects that respond to the soft poetry of oils, and others to the dramatic punctuation of acrylics or the meditative calm of tempera on canvas. Cao’s current palette of egg tempera reflects his Taoist philosophy and need to depict a world of unlimited calm.
