评论｜刘讴睿：坐在房间里，到森林去

刘讴睿：坐在房间里，到森林去

文 / 姜伊威

刘讴睿当年有两个选择：当一名运动员，或当一名艺术家。他选择了后者。不过，运动员和艺术家不仅是职业身份，也是人格或天性；职业有得选，人格和天性没得选。运动员有驾驭自己身体的天然冲动，这在刘讴睿那里一直被保留了。2014年的一次踢球时，刘讴睿身受重伤，不得不进行长达三年的修养。这必然是一个痛苦的经历——手头有许多杂志，刘讴睿用它们涂涂抹抹或随意剪切，聊以消遣。

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取出钢板，渐渐康复，已经是2016年了。刘讴睿从沈阳搬到北京，有了新的工作室。过去的作品一概留在东北，只带来了这些杂志纸。杂志上的涂抹似乎都是不留心也不刻意的，但为新阶段的架上创作引入了可能性。到今天，刘讴睿承认，2017年前后的部分架上作品是疗愈之作。《失语者》《绅士》这些作品中隐隐呈现了与希区柯克《后窗》异曲同工的视角：轮椅上的观看者既主动又被动地接受外部的图像信息，又因为空间和视觉高度的限制，也既主动又被动地吸收了一个封闭环境内的信息。

早期作品“失语者”，2017-2018 

早期作品“绅士”，2017-2019

“每个艺术家的工作室都直观并真实地呈现了自己的状态，”刘讴睿认为，“因为中国的美术教育，我们都对吕西安·弗洛伊德或者弗朗西斯·培根这些大师的工作室耳熟能详，太有名了。我在阅读或上网的时候看到艺术家工作室，都会停留一下。我觉得这个磁场是要慢慢建立的。不管作品好不好、成不成，把‘场’建立好都是第一步。”2020年，刘讴睿在马刺画廊的一个实验项目中尝试将架上作品和工作室同时展示出来。“但我不希望用‘搭建’的形式去展示，这样一来展览结束后所有的材料都废弃了。我想要‘回收’，所以通过摄影，用纪实的、散点透视的方式呈现出来。搭建的时候也贴上了摄影用的布面材料，穿插了一些真实的画册、画布和颜料。”

  图片致谢艺术家及SPURS Gallery

“刘讴睿：决赛，圈，工作室 ” 2020 SPURS Gallery展览现场

新氧艺O2art798空间的个展“森林与猎人”将呈现刘讴睿2020年以来的新作。这批作品代表了刘讴睿在新一个阶段的体验：当思绪发散开来，自己浸入到绘画中时，刘讴睿有了一种猎人般的感受。他既画狩猎时的自己（《狩猎》《提鸟猎人》），也画自己在丛林中不期而遇看到的事物（《森林之果》《花·火》）。刘讴睿习惯在睡前看无声的荒野求生节目，画面中鲜红的果实被他解释为葡萄，进而升级为他的酒神精神。《影子迷藏》或《向外》这样的作品能够看到他静坐于画布之前的时候，身边的空气已化作一片野蛮的森林，笔触既是收获时的喜悦，也是对丛林中危险之物的闪躲和探索。

某种意义上说，艺术家分成两种，一种是作为完成品呈现的，另一种是在持续的发散、变动、进行时中呈现的。一个有名的例子是马克·罗斯科，他的作品总是在聆听音乐的过程中完成的，画面是聆听的复现。刘讴睿曾练110米栏，这是一个非常讲求节奏的竞技项目：艺术创作与身体训练有很大的相同之处。尽管曾因为踢球而不得不中止绘画，但踢球时心无旁骛的专注感与绘画时的感受是一样的。另一方面，在新个展的作品中，刘讴睿也有意收敛了过去创作中强烈的发散和无边界感，随机尺寸或者裸布上的绘画，大部分被严格限定在200cm或260cm的尺寸。“即便不参与竞技，我自己玩的时候我也会可以练习一些技术点。我的工作室乍一看就像被飞机轰炸过一样，但其实我的工作也非常理性：提炼出问题，然后矫正，再重新去操作，一点点达到自己目标。每一个环节都有明确的目标。”

工作室现场‍

工作室一角

在材料的处理上，刘讴睿力图修炼出纯属而只属于自己的技术。他仰慕蒙克这些大师的质感，但他必须从自身中提取出自己独属的质感。“我在色粉和纸面上做了很多尝试，最后形成我要的质感。我在做之前就会有非常强烈的意识。之后，我在画布上也渐渐能达到了我想要的和色粉的契合，我就会转向画布。丙烯我也用，我很崇尚油画的技术，现阶段我也很明确地需要丙烯的特质，能快干，能叠加，在科技上很完善。在尝试中，目的和可能性就会慢慢出来。它的优点是什么，缺点是什么，厚度如何处理？我如何发挥它的特性？在材料上，我要进行对自己个人的训练，顺从这个材料。”

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工作室材料局部

从“狩猎”主题的一系列作品来看，刘讴睿具有精密的造型能力，对色彩的运用也堪称高级；或许是因为鲁迅美院训练的缘故，刘讴睿的作品在技术和气象上不失大气。然而，他的画也构成了一个极为私密、极为个人的世界。刘讴睿社交不多，维持着非常简单的生活方式，运动和绘画几乎构成了日常生活的全部。在规定好了的空间和时间节律之下，刘讴睿在自己的世界内是完全打开的。每周四雷打不动地踢球或打羽毛球，其余时间则徜徉在工作室中，画累了就做剪贴，剪累了就回头画画，或是摆弄画布、画框、调色盘，在不同的作品中切换，捕捉自己的意识流。

不过，这样的作品也对观者提出了一些要求，能够“同呼吸”的人，才更容易感受到画中的律动和艺术家绘画时的身心感受——想想井上有一后期作品中所传达的疲惫和疼痛吧。这并不是说刘讴睿的作品像井上那样沉重；如果借用文学评论家的话，重要的是艺术家“自己的身体是到场的”，它也邀请观看者与艺术家同在，在油墨的气味中屏息，体验树枝草丛的触感，和饮酒壮胆后面对猎物时的紧张和兴奋。

群展“旷野之途 2022”新氧艺O2art展览现场

Liu Ourui: Sitting in the Room but Sensing the Forest

by Jiang Yiwei‍‍‍‍‍

Liu Ourui had two choices back then: to become an athlete or an artist. He chose the latter. However, athletes and artists are not only professional identities, but also personalities or natures; one may choose one’s profession but not one’s character and nature. Liu Ourui preserves the athletes’ instinctive urge to control their bodies. In 2014, he was seriously injured while playing football and had to rest for as long as three-years. It must have been a painful experience; with many magazines in hand, Liu Ourui used them to scrawl or collage to pass the time.

It was already 2016 when the plate was removed and he gradually recovered. Liu Ourui moved from Shenyang to Beijing and had a new studio. His past works were left in the northeast hometown, and only those scrawled magazine pages were brought with him. They seemed to be messed up casually and thoughtlessly, but they opened up possibilities for a new stage of his creation. Even until today, Liu Ourui acknowledges that some of his works around 2017 were made for healing. These works, includingThe Aphasiac and The Gentleman, implicitly present a similar perspective to Hitchcock’s Rear Window: a viewer in the wheelchair is receiving pictorial information from the external actively but passively, while absorbing information within a closed environment actively but passively due to restricted visual height.

“Every artist’s studio is an intuitive and authentic representation of his or her own state,” reckons Liu Ourui, “Thanks to the art education in China, we’re all familiar with the studios of masters like Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon; they are just too well-known. Whenever I see an artist’s studio in books or online, I’d stop for a moment. I think this field of connection has to be built up slowly. Whether the work is good or not, establishing the field is the first step.” In 2020, Liu Ourui tried to present his easel paintings and his studio at the same time in an experimental project at SPURS Gallery. “But I didn’t want to ‘build it up’, if so all materials would be discarded after the exhibition. I wanted to ‘recycle’, so I displayed it through photography, in a documentary way with scattered perspective. The cloth materials used in photography were also part of the construction, interspersed with some real albums, canvases and paints.”

The solo exhibition “Chaser in the Jungle” will present Liu Ourui’s new works from 2020. These works represent his experience at a new stage: when his thoughts diverged and he is immersed in painting, Liu Ourui feels like a hunter. He painted himself hunting (Hunting and The Hunter Who Carries the Bird), and things he encountered in the jungle (Fruit of the Forest and Flower·Fire). Liu Ourui is used to watch muted wilderness survival shows before going to bed, where he interpreted the bright red fruits on the screen as grapes, thus promoting his Dionysian spirit. In works such as Shadow Hiding and Outward, the air around him turned into a savage forest when he was sitting in front of the canvas. The brushstrokes show not only the joy of harvest but also the dodging and exploration of dangerous things in the jungle.

Somehow artists are divided into two kinds: one is presented as a finished work; the other is presented in a continuously diverging, changing and progressive way. A famous example is Mark Rothko, whose works are always done in the process of listening to music, and the visual presentations are the representation of listening. Liu Ourui used to practice the 110m hurdles, a very rhythmic game; artistic creation has much in common with physical training. Although he had to stop painting because of playing football, he felt the same undistracted attention while playing football as while painting. Besides, in his new solo exhibition, Liu Ourui has deliberately restrained his strong sense of unconfined discursiveness in his past works. Paintings of random sizes or on bare canvas are now mostly restricted to 200cm or 260cm. “Even if I’m not competing, I can practice some skills on my own. My studio looks like it’s been bombed by a plane at first glance, but my work is very rational: it is to extract the problem, correct it, and start over again, to reach my goal little by little. There is a clear goal for each step I take.”

As for processing materials, Liu Ourui tried hard to cultivate his unique skill. He admired the texture made by masters such as Munch, but he had to extract from himself something completely of his own. “I experiment a lot with toner and paper to get the texture I want. I have a very strong sense of it before I start. Then, when I can gradually achieve the desired fit with the color powder on the canvas, I will turn to the canvas. I also use propylene. I admire the skills of oil painting very much. At the present stage, I clearly need the characteristics of propylene; it’s technologically perfect as it can dry quickly and overlay. Purposes and possibilities come out slowly in the process of experimenting. What are the advantages, the disadvantages, and how to deal with the thickness? How do I exploit its characteristics? I have to train myself personally to compliant the material.”

Looking at the series of works under the theme “hunting”, Liu Ourui has precise modeling ability and advanced use of colors. His works are also impactful in terms of skills and styles, perhaps credit to the training he received at LuXun Academy of Fine Arts. However, his paintings build up a very private and personal world at the same time. Liu Ourui doesn’t socialize much and maintains a very simple lifestyle, with sports and painting take up almost all of his daily life. Under the defined pace of time and space, Liu Ourui completely opens himself up in his own world. Apart from playing football or badminton every Thursdays, he spend all of his time in the studio, doing collage if he’s tired of painting, and paint if he’s wearied of cutting, or playing with canvases, frames, palettes, switching between different works to capture his stream of consciousness.

Therefore, such works also put forward some requirements on the viewers. Those who can “breathe together” with the artist are more likely to feel the rhythm of the painting and the spiritual state of the artist while painting --- thinking of the exhaustion and pain conveyed in Inoue Yuichi’s later works. It doesn’t mean that Liu Ourui’s works are as heavy as Inoue’s; to quote from literary critics, it is important that the artist’s “own body is present”, as it invites the viewers to be with the artist, to hold their breath with the smell of ink and paint, to experience the touch of twigs and grass, and to feel the tension and excitement of facing preys with strengthened courage after drinking.

关于艺术家

About the Artist

刘讴睿，1985年出生于辽宁。2009年毕业于鲁迅美术学院油画系第一工作室。现工作生活于北京。

Liu Ourui, was born in Liaoning province in 1985. Graduated from the First Studio of the Oil Painting Department of Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. He is now living and working in Beijing.‍