Evian Wenyi Zhang’s paintings emerge from a discrete approach to the harmonious aggregation and rearrangement of visual indexes in an act of practised saccade. Each miniature canvas represents a transient visual fixation point, disentangling what she identifies as “areas of interest” within the visual surface. Her source images are extracted from multi-mediated reference material, such as a screenshot of an alarm clock from a late 80s Austrian film, as in A Visit from Satan (2023). Elemental repetition and the grid reference both the modernist canvas and the digital screen; the composite result is made up of constituent cells that read both organic and architectural, advancing a distinctive pictorial idealism that simultaneously aestheticises the cognitive work performed between the eye and the mind. Zhang’s tabulated output inherently cultivates an aesthetic sensibility, a visual stutter of data accumulation, purposefully oblique yet maintaining a semiotic integrity that subverts the visual prejudice of the exacting gaze in its very uniformity. At its core, Zhang’s work is a study of image making; it is not an exercise in fragmentation or synthesis; rather, it engenders a sophisticated sensorial response to the de-accelerated process of mediated visual information design.

Public Gallery

Evian Wenyi Zhang