The White Cube; a sanctuary for the seasoned art snob. And everyone else? Well, a little bit uncomfortable to be honest. Fill it with colourful canvases, groovy Venezuelan music and a stack of paper for doodling and you get Ronald Paredes’s show.
Located on the second floor of the salubrious KIC boutique mall, the exhibition explores human relationships and their impact on our lives through the artist’s use of the line. Paredes takes his line for a walk across the canvas, the floor and the walls, to create clever and perfectly balanced mazes, hinting at human and natural forms along the way.
Lines intersect to create shapes, but no shape is sealed or isolated, rather it remains part of a larger and much more complex picture, just as humans in society are inextricably linked to one another.
“The use of one single line to produce the entire composition corresponds to a necessity I have of challenging myself,” he says, “I don’t believe in easy art”.
Each piece demands your attention, compelling you to trace the journey of a single line from start to finish as if to prove to yourself that it really is unbroken. You are invited to stare at and engage with the works even if art is not your “thing”. “That stare is a big part of the strategy behind my pieces, to somehow produce that invaluable time of interaction between the piece and the spectator.”
Beneath curving corner-turning contours are smears of colour, supposed to represent different human emotions, but they are a bit too squeezed-out-the-tube for me. Attractive, yes, but too safe and pretty. I want something more crunchy, something unexpected or challenging.
But the exhibition isn’t simply about looking, it’s also an ongoing dialogue; “I want people to interact with the show and with me”. He shows me some of the visual responses produced in the gallery by visitors. “Lots of people try to imitate my logo, I like that!” Others draw whatever they fancy, there’s even some on the lewd side; “I love it, I think it’s cool!”
By encouraging people to take part in the exhibition, and to engage with the artist himself, Paredes subverts the conventional code of the White Cube and succeeds in breaking down the barriers between art and spectator. So come for an ogle, a groove and a doodle.
Ronald Paredes: Theology of Relationships is on daily 10am-9pm until the end of April at L211, KIC Gallery Shopping Mall, 333 Jiangdong Zhong Lu, Hexi. Admission is free.
