“The subject is yourself, your impressions, your emotions in the face of nature. It is within yourself that you must look, not around you.” So wrote Eugène Delacroix in his Journal. Confronted with the works of Li Xin, these words resonate with a particular resonance. They invite us to take the measure of an excess — that of a space extending to infinity which the artist aspires to embrace. The monochrome color, the islands of matter, the flows and the breaches, the ebb and flow, all contribute to defining his art by the standard of a mental, sensory and memorable experience of which the Yellow River is the originating motif. Li Xin carries it within himself, as Cézanne said: “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.” Every gesture the painter makes over time in creating his paintings proceeds from this one and only motif. While he knows that giving sight to the landscape in its totality and absolute fullness amounts to a mad wager, he has invented for himself the means to make of it a nascent organism.

“Water,” says Li Xin, “is my primary material.” And indeed it is through water that the painting comes into being — the element that shapes its image through the events, even the accidents, of its expanse. To achieve this, the painter says he lets his papers drink it in, carefully chosen for their absorptive quality. Li Xin’s painting thus proceeds from the duality of an osmosis: on one hand, the emanations of the ink he prepares himself from raw pigments, which slowly takes possession of the iconic field; on the other, the felt experience of the artist, whose body is the vector. What results are not monochromes in the flat sense of the word, but an entire world of variations on a single tone ranging between the infinitely thin and density. The memorable echo of the Yellow River traces there something like a geology of painting which, through the moods of time, aligns with the concept of vitalism so dear to the Enlightenment, while those of the artist connect it to the principle of inner necessity championed by Kandinsky. Grounded in these references, the art of Li Xin articulates the terms of a prospective pictorial thinking that is rooted in tradition while renewing it from within.