So I'd like to begin with a story of art crossing borders.
It concerns a man, an artist who grows up in a provincial town at the shores of a vast and powerful empire.
He recognises his vacation in his early 20s, but conditions in his homeland they're advancing cannot keep up with his ideas.
So after years of study, he leaves home keeping inside of him.
Much of what he learnt and he travels overseas. He paints, he experiments.
He lives in other places, other cities. And as he moves, his work develops.
He comes to understand that where previously he had been repeating others use of material and technique,
if he is to express what he wants to, he must push his materials further beyond their limits.
His art becomes explosive, shedding conventions using matter to go beyond itself towards the spiritual a synthesis,
as he once wrote of the real and the super real.
This artist whose trajectory I sketch is not psychogenic, though it could well be,
is in fact El Greco, the late 16th and early 17th century painter or an increase.
He spent his twenties in Venice and Rome before settling finally in Toledo,
and who has provided us with some of our definitive images of transcendent experience.
Toledo shimmers under the heavens on hills as wet, vaporous as the sky.
They can't of gaze is buried in his earthly finery, surrounded by a raft of local notables.
His gilded armour glistens against a Christ like white sling.
His arms and legs are so heavy that they force for St Stephen's, carrying them to bend almost double.
The tassel from Stephen's cassock brushes his armour with a kind of visceral effect, bringing home the tang of metal against soft fabric.
But what has always struck fear is more than the triumph of naturalistic observation.
Taking place in the painting's bottom half is the ghostly riot of abstract,
elongated figures that sit above on rafts of dirty cloud upturned faces bathed in Christ's spectral light.
These figures, who see him as they ascends to free themselves and the demands of accurate figuration pose a set of questions, perhaps unanswerable.
Everybody knows that in pushing his art beyond nature further and further towards abstraction,
El Greco is trying as he aged to paint the invisible saiga.
Jiang shares his goal. He acknowledges this. It is the reason for the beguiling set of paintings begun in 2016, titled In Search of El Greco.
Everybody knows what El Greco is after. Yes, but what he actually succeeded in visualising has always been less certain.
We are well beyond the opinions of those 19th century connoisseurs for whom his rejection
of naturalism was the simple result of a lack of facility of quote execrable drawing.
As Sir Henry, layered trustee of our own National Gallery, once put it, likewise,
the theories explained his work away as the emanations of a mystic or visionary have been rightly dismissed.
So what exactly do these ghostly, elongated figures mean?
Do they really claim to capture and represent divinity to render the invisible visible?
I am not so sure.
Nor was the philosopher Gilles de Leurs, who saw in the chaotic jumble of figures that crowd the top half of the burial of the countable guys.
The beginnings of a painterly tradition that renounces precisely all claim to capture and represent the divine.
A properly pictorial atheism is what he called it. I'll quote him at some length.
So he says the figures are lifted up or doubled over or contorted, freed from all figuration.
They no longer have anything to represent or the right since in this domain, they are content to refer to the existing code of the church.
Thus, in themselves, they no longer have to do with anything but sensations.
Celestial, infernal terrestrial sensations. The religious sentiment is painted in all the colours of the world.
The divine figures are wrought by a free creative work, by a fantasy in which everything is permitted.
So for Douleurs, what is really radical about this are in opposition to all those high renaissance.
All the pieces that imagined the intercession of divinity as a volumetric perspective or
physical component of the world is the renunciation of the claim to external reality.
El Greco kind of, as a result of the intensely religious character in the society he's painted for,
El Greco is content to distort the real because he knows at some level that the scenes he depicts can never be visualised.
They are rather expressions of sentiment, religious sensations, religious paintings set out to bring the heavens down to earth,
to rest, to rationalise the invisible, to embody it in volume and form with El Greco.
It recognises this task to be impossible. Invisibility is elsewhere than in the painting.
Now, the less his argument is typically woolly when it comes to historical accuracy,
but it suggests an answer to a question who's always puzzled me about the art of psychology.
That is why I paint.
Why persist in the production of objects that are so evidently limited, for which limitation is built into the very fabric of their medium?
When every fibre of your practise seems to strain in the opposite direction towards a broader perspective, one quote in dialogue with the universe.
So we're all familiar with. After today, we definitely are.
But we're familiar with the explosion events that predicts extraterrestrials,
those massive expenditures of willpower and resource that imagine a radically non-human viewpoint looking down from above.
We've all seen the Sky Ladder Sci explains the need for non-human viewers in transcendent terms.
Only an alien could view an artwork from outside the admittedly the superhuman structures that condition the ordinary viewer gazing from the heavens.
This alien would look beyond ideology, nationhood and the global market.
There's uneasy partners in the play of contemporary art production.
Painting offers no such escape. It is neither ephemeral nor universal.
Two dimensional mounted to a wall, it demands an embodied human viewpoint.
It deals with visibility, so recognises the limits this entails.
At times, he can even sound as if his paintings are subsidiary mediations of either the small scale explosions that produced them,
or of the larger explosion events to which they relate.
Quote You can never recreate through painting the visceral experience of the Earth vibrating or the heat your body feels.
But then other impressions from that instant give rise to the creative impulse to make paintings or drawings of the actual experience.
Now, to recognise the limits of painting is not the same as to belittle the following the the recognition is often empowering
when painting is liberated from the task of representing spirit when it recognises the limits of the visible.
It requires a new freedom to further an ageing El Greco advances towards a reality.
The more his paintings come to luxuriate in their own materiality and legwork, like the opening of the Fifth SEAL, is startling in its economy.
There is no attempt to integrate the figures into a believable narrative sequence.
The genuflecting st to the left is a giant.
The other figures are diminutive, tortured mannequins, fragments of a large unity to which they do not add up.
The coloured drapes which they hold press forwards, squeezing out atmosphere.
Framing their naked forms in cloth in a manner that would not be seen again in European high art until the ad.
And of modernism, three hundred years later, El Greco has reduced and refined his painting,
liberated from the demands of accurate representation to the arrangement of coloured masses in flat space, which is what painting is.
This brings us back to in search of El Greco number eight.
If the controlled explosion of Valencia and gunpowder that created the painting was an event something temporal and transient,
then the waves of blue paint that Coruscant across its paper surface of something more and something less than that.
They are its imprint, its remnants. That beauty, like El Greco saying, works on two levels at the level of representation.
Size forms have a strangely empty, mournful character. They refer to a reality, an event that is at least partially absent elsewhere.
The explosion is in the past. It will never be made present just as El Greco as miraculous superhuman figures lose something.
I think if we insist on imagining them as part of the real world, but painting cannot only work at this level.
It insists on present is present and size forms like vast blue flowers,
birds with wings outstretched returns to the beauty of the visible of what we can see.
So, but I can offer some conclusions about this work of so-called Jones and the historical conversation attempt with El Greco.
They have to do with the limits of representation of the taxonomic drive to record, classify,
isolate and explain this all too often being the intellectual counterpart to Western societies history of expansion and domination.
The lesson that in search of El Greco seems to take from this least typical of Christian painters,
is that there are limits to human knowledge, to our representations.
There are spheres of existence unknown to us that can never be made visible, and these limitations have a beauty all their own.
Thank you.