Liu Ye and the Romantic Abandonment of the Portrait

It takes the ironic and transgressive, playful but very serious genius of the Chinese artist Liu Ye to put Antonello da Messina and the "Super Pop" cartoon Miffy in the same work of art, or to compare the precision of Jan van Eyck's brushstroke and the Magical Realism of Jorge Luis Borges, rather than the haunting madness of Vladimir Nabokov. Thus, with simplicity and taste for play, Liu Ye has put together an exhibition with a series of new works that he is bringing to London for the second time after 21 years, at David Zwirner's gallery. The title is an amusement in itself since it refers to John Adams' 1999 symphony Naive and Sentimental Music. A composition which in turn alludes to a very serious essay written by Friedrich Schiller at the end of the eighteenth century and which has as its central subject the poetic theory. Important themes and references that Liu Ye deals with having fun, using a broad and meta-referential gaze that moves towards a method of portraiture that is meticulous but multivalent, introspective and expansive.