Beyond the Window of Painting

“Painting is a window open to the world,” wrote the Italian humanist Leon Battista Alberti in De Pictura (1435), setting the rules of perspective and depth for centuries. Today, at Lisson Gallery in Shanghai, that window is fractured and reassembled by three contemporary artists - Dexter Dalwood, Van Hanos, and Zhao Gang - who turn the canvas into a battleground between surface and space, memory and imagination. Dalwood engages with tradition only to overturn it: in Hard and Lux the gaze doesn’t contemplate but peers through rain-streaked windshields and snow-filled windows, while another work sets an 18th-century still life against cosmic visions, suspending painting between classicism and science fiction. Hanos instead embraces doubt: sometimes realist down to photographic detail, sometimes abstract and visionary, he creates canvases that change face with every glance. With Chicken, Duck and Fish, Zhao Gang uses cuts of meat and fish as metaphors for identities dismantled and reassembled, while his collages on Qingdao weave together personal memory and digital imaginaries. The result is an exhibition that does more than represent - it questions the very act of representation, pushing painting to become an ambiguous, elusive experience.