Eternal France

#89029    60″ X 40″    ac

• J.F. Millet: “The Gleaners”. Louvre, Paris

Sometimes the style of a painting is the message. Consider this to be true for some examples of Pointillism and Abstract Expression. If it’s style you discuss, Chen can paint like anybody whose name you can think of, but in most cases a gross approximation of a style can fill his purposes. He is not an imitator or a thief, not a counterfeiter, but an adapter, and even a transmogrifier.He reworks the icons, altering their structure, changing their colors, adding here, taking away there, revolving perspectives, adjusting volumes – any quirk or trick which will bring the image to Chen’s purposes. And when he is playful he will give one painter’s style to another painter’s images, as rendering a Millet icon with a Seurat brush, which of course, gives the image a double icon.

In this homage to the Centennial of the Eiffel Tower Chen has moved Millet’s gleaners from the French field to another, stripped away unnecessary details, and changed the style radically from Barbizon peasant realism to Post-Impressionist Pointillism.

Jean Francois Millet (1814-1875) glorified the moral superiority of hard labor. Gustave Eiffel raised civil engineering to the heavens and built a structure that dumbfounded his critics.

This is one of Chen’s most beautiful paintings.

– Lawrence Jeppson