Pilar Corrias presents Thermal Landscapes, featuring new paintings by Shanghai artist Cui Jie. Cui Jie's works explore the uniformity of contemporary architecture, blending fractured views of past and present cities, evoking nostalgia for the past and utopian visions of the future. The exhibition challenges the dominance of skyscrapers in modern megacities, especially in light of the current climate crisis. It questions whether these architectural giants, prioritizing transparency and monumental scale, are sustainable given the energy needed to cool them down, often at the expense of aesthetics.

In Cui's latest paintings, modern glass skyscrapers from around the world collide with oversized anthropomorphic animal ceramics, looming over and engulfing the structures below. These surreal landscapes blur the boundaries, as buildings and sculptures seamlessly merge and dissipate. These animal sculptures, originally mass-produced in China during the 1980s and 1990s for Western export, symbolize China's transformation before and after economic liberalization, illustrating the absorption of China's evolving cultural identity into the globalized economy.

Cui is intrigued by the use of tinted glass on skyscrapers, which not only reflects heat in hot climates but also acts as a mirror, blending the building with its surroundings through patterns and textures. These paintings feature glossy building surfaces illuminated by an orange heat glow, contrasting with the cracked surfaces of the animal sculptures. These cracks, initially resulting from firing errors, became embraced as a unique aesthetic feature of the sculptures. In both cases, Cui explores the transformative effects of extreme heat on materials, a process that can be both creative and destructive.

Cui Lie's paintings are intricate compositions of layered images, combining photographs and imagination to depict multiple perspectives of different buildings and locations simultaneously. Each layer meticulously represents the evolution of China's urban landscape, serving as comparative studies of cities and reflections of China's open-and-reform policies. These artworks tell a personal history shaped by the aesthetic influences of various times and places, ranging from the architectural complexity of Bauhaus to Chinese propaganda and Soviet communist aesthetics.

22 Sept - 4 Nov 2023

Pilar Corrias

2 Savile Row