走近的距离
——赵晓东笔下的农民形象
王 林
中国“三农”问题的普遍性和严重性，引起了不少画家对农民题材的关注，赵晓东是其中的佼佼者之一。
他笔下的农民不是田间地头的劳动者，而是城里打工经商的边缘人。这些人就生活在画家身边，他和他们的接触是近距离的。他随时在观察他们，也随时在想像他们。
赵晓东对农民工生活的观察与想像，其思维角度是平视的。表现其劳作的辛苦，但并不强调苦难与悲情；描绘其底层的生存状态，但并不着力去凸现弱势群体的需求和期待。画家无意于抬高对象的空洞颂扬，也没有俯瞰他者的廉价同情。和上一代人充满拯救愿望的理想主义不同，赵晓东只想描绘他们，描绘他们的生活表情、劳动姿态以及和他们有关的工具、器物、商品等等。他想保持一种纪实性和平等心态，在绘画想像中走近他们，为这些身处边缘与底层的平凡人群和普通劳动者造像，把更多的用心放在形象特点和塑造方式上。
赵晓东所画的农民工，已经脱离自耕农式的乡村环境和自然状态，是中国社会改革开放时期处于市场经济初级阶段的城市贫民，其时代特点自不待言。因为取材身边之故，他塑造的农民形象有非常鲜明的地域特点——四川人的身材、长相和劲健坚韧、吃苦耐劳的性格。这些东西对赵晓东而言，是耳濡目染，烂熟于心的。他之所以能够对他们进行细致入微的刻画，显然源自对象特征的内心体会与形象记忆。就这点来说，赵晓东有别于同龄的许多画家，他拒绝那种简化的时髦图式，追求深度的绘画表达，希望在技艺性的绘画语言中不断深化，去形成自己独具特点的创造性。
赵晓东对油画的理解是从材料开始的。其作品肌理强劲，笔触有力，人物塑造体块感极强，其间颜料的厚度与性状给人留下深刻的印象。质感与手感的相互融合，不仅有视觉直观的挑衅性，而且有视觉心理的冲击力，让人不得不停留于画面本身，停留于颜料构造的形式关系，停留于审美感动与审美想像里，领受心物之间互相摩擦、磨合所带来的兴奋与激动，而不仅仅是关于人物形象的认识。这种对于感觉与材料相互关系的把握，是油画手绘技艺之魅力所在，画家不可不察也。
颜料到颜色的涂抹，成形于笔触，赵晓东对此熟练而自如。在表现下层劳动者粗犷、粗鲁甚至不无粗俗的形象时，厚重、强烈与放纵的笔触，则显得坚实而饱满，其对比不乏运笔抒写的自由，其动态保持着形体完整的要求。加上冷暖色的并置与调配，色相的差异与色度的饱和，赵晓东笔下的画面有丰富而不单薄、复杂而不紊乱的视觉效果，给人以生动鲜活、酣畅淋漓之感。
为了改变写实绘画局限于客观对象的审美惯性，赵晓东对画面背景有意识作了特殊处理，或者取单色平涂，或者采用虚化空间，尽量不作场景描绘。这种虚实对比，不仅使画面因其背景单纯显得爽快而不壅塞，并且使前景人物由于背景抽离而具有造像感和想像性，同时，使画家对形象与道具的精心刻画，能够更加鲜明地凸现出来。在赵晓东的作品中，观赏的注意力常常会迅速投向人物肌肉、衣衫皱折和拖泥带水的灰桶、小车等细节处理，这些东西的绘画性表达的确耐人寻味。
由于当代绘画开放性造成的观念化，技艺已不再是判断绘画价值的唯一根据，但在技艺性的绘画之中，恰当的技术处理和绘制方式却是观念化实现的前提，实质上也就是我们经常谈论的绘画性。观念化与绘画性不是并列关系，而是同创共生的。它们共同体现为手绘的悟性，一种形式因素营造的画面氛围。在这方面赵晓东是很有天赋的。他对于农民题材绘画的理解有自其独到之处。说到底，画家对于农民及其生活的表现不可能真正达到主客合一，艺术家和对象的关系始终是一种想像性的关系。也只有在想像之中农民作为绘画对象的主体性才能得以重建，这对于农民题材绘画非常重要。因为在今天的城市生活中，农民、农民工往往被人忽视甚至是贱视，他们承担最低价最繁重的劳动，带来城市人的富裕和城市的繁荣，却过着最苦最累最无保障也最无希望的生活，他们应该得到社会的尊重、艺术家的尊重。赵晓东在为农民造像的时候，象是在打造一座座纪念雕塑，这种想像中的客观性使笔下的农民具有了自在的主体身份，不再是艺术家表达主观意图的代码。从这个意义上讲，赵晓东对人文热情的某种克制、对表现性的某种克制是必要的，因为精神意向必须实现为语言表达和绘制方式，才能成为绘画的精神和绘画的意向。
当然，我们还应在这样的精神意向中追寻问题意识的存在，这方面的不断深化还有待于创作的推进。好在赵晓东已有可喜的成就和确定的方向，他是不会辜负师友希望和画界期待的。
2006年12月3日
四川美院桃花山下
A Close Look At Peasants
--Images of peasants in Zhao Xiaodong’s artistic creation
By Wang Lin
The issues of peasants, agriculture and rural areas are becoming so common and serious in China that the subject of peasants has attracted the attention of numerous artists, among whom Zhao Xiaodong is one of the most outstanding.
Peasants in Zhao Xiaodong artistic works are not those working on the farm and in the fields, but those working or doing business in the city as peripheral people. These people are living around Zhao Xiaodong and they are in close contact with each other. The artist watches them and he is imagining their lives at all times.
When Zhao Xiaodong is observing these peasants and imagining their lives, he treats them as his equals. He expresses the hardships of their work, but not focusing on their sufferings and pathos; he portrays their substrate status of living, but not depicting the needs and expectations of these lower-class people. The artist has no intention of chanting an empty eulogy of his objects. Neither does he show his cheap sympathy by looking down at them. Contrary to his previous generation’s idealism of saving others, Zhao Xiaodong only wants to portrays them, their facial expressions, their postures at work as well as the tools, utensils and commodities that they use in their lives. With the intention of making a true-to-life report of these people’s lives and treating them as equals, he tries his best to get a little closer to these ordinary people and common laborers who are living on the brink and the bottom of society in his artistic imagination. He portrays them, focusing more on their images and the ways of artistic reproductions of these images.
The peasant workers depicted by Zhao Xiaodong are divorced from their countryside background and the natural status of those peasant proprietors. As poor urban residents who are living in the early stage of market economy and the period of social reforms, they have obvious time traits. Making use of materials from around him, Zhao Xiaodong portrays peasants who have marked traits of the area they are living in—the statures and appearance of people living in Sichuan as well as their strength, perseverance, their hardworking and their abilities to endure hardships. These traits are quite familiar to Zhao Xiaodong, as he lives among them and is influenced by what he constantly sees and hears. His careful portrayal of them originates obviously from his subtle thinking and memory of their images. In this respect, Zhao Xiaodong differs from many of his contemporaries. He rejects those simplified modern patterns and pursues a profound way of artistic creation, hoping to form his unique characteristics and creativity in the process of further developing his language of art.
Zhao Xiaodong’s understanding of oil painting begins with his use of painting materials. His works have powerful textures and strokes, thus his characters give us a strong sense of masses and the thickness and shapes of colors leave us a deep impression. The sense of texture intertwines with the sense of strokes, giving us not only a powerful impact on our sight, but also strong impacts on our minds. Audience cannot help but stop before his works, pondering at the pictures, at the relationships between shapes of colors, at the aesthetic sensations and imaginations. In this process, we do not only have a better understanding of the images portrayed in the works of art, but feel the excitement from the interaction between his works and our minds. This killed mastery of the relationship between senses and colors is the charm of oil painting which an artist should never ignore.
Painting materials and colors form the strokes of oil paintings, and Zhao Xiaodong is skilled at this. In expressing the crudeness, roughness and even vulgarity of the lower-level working class people, Zhao Xiaodong’s uses thick, powerful and bold strokes to make his characters look strong, firm and full. He uses these strokes at liberty to form contrasts, thus the characters he portrayed are dynamic in movement and complete in shapes. Cold colors coexist and mix with warm colors, plus the differentiation between colors and saturation of chroma, all theses make the pictures of his paintings rich, lively, complex but in no sense chaotic.
To break away from the tradition of being limited by what one really sees or experiences in the objective world, Zhao Xiaodong makes special treatment to the background of his paintings on purpose. He tries to avoid depicting the background. Instead he employs either a single color in the background or virtualizes the said space. This contrast of the real and the virtual has not only made the background look simple and pure instead of giving us a sense of being crowded, but also enables the artist to focus on the careful depiction of the central images, making them more vivid and expressive and giving us food to imagine. When we are appreciating Zhao Xiaodong’s works, we often focus our attention on the characters’ muscles, the wrinkles on their clothes and the treatment of such details as barrels and carts dragging through mud and water. The artist’s treatment of these details is truly meaning and thought-provoking.
The openness in modern art has resulted in various concepts in artistic creation, making techniques not the only criterion in assessing the value of a piece of oil painting. However, making proper technical treatments and employing appropriate artistic methods are the prerequisite of realizing one’s concepts. Concepts and techniques are not contradictory, but inner-related and coexistent. They work together to form the atmospheres of a piece of painting. Being a gifted artist in this respect, Zhao Xiaodong has his unique understanding of creating the images of peasants. He is aware of the fact that his portrayal of farmers and their life cannot be completely true to life, and relationship between an artist and his objects is one of using imaginations. Only in imagination can peasants be reproduced on the canvas and become the real subjects of attention. This is very important for paintings on the subject matter of peasants, because farmers and peasant workers are often ignored or even looked down upon in today’s urban life. They are undertaking the heaviest work with the lowest pays, bringing prosperity to cities but leading a most difficult and unpromising life. They deserve the respect of artists and the society. In creating images for these farmers, Zhao Xiaodong behaves like he is building a series of monuments, his objective thinking making peasants possess their own free status in his works instead of being the codes of the artist’s own intentions. In this sense, it is necessary for him to exercise some constraints on the expressions of his own humanistic enthusiasm.
Of course we should continue to seek existence of problem consciousness in this spirit and push our artistic creation forward. Zhao Xiaodong has already made some achievements. With a determined goal in his mind, he will undoubtedly live up to the expectations of his teachers, friends as well as the whole artistic circle.
(This article was written on Dec. 3, 2006 in Sichuan Institute of Fine arts.)
【编辑：霍春常】
编辑：admin