Sleepless In Paris

Sleepless in Paris (2015), a monochrome triptych six metres in length, is a meditation upon the artist’s mixed feelings about the city of Paris that can be read almost like a text. A series of events and personalities drawn from observation, memory and imagination traverse the crowded canvas from end to end, overlapping and interacting in an idiosyncratic jumble of figures, objects and words. There are clues: a naked male figure outlined in white and clutching a model of the Eiffel Tower must surely be the artist himself. His furrowed brow and melancholy demeanour represent his sorrow at what has become of the city he once loved. Tai speaks about his sadness in observing that in recent years the streets of Paris have become more and more populated by homeless beggars, and that after the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ terrorist attack people now live in fear. ‘The beauty of my memory contrasts with the sense of loss in reality; this made my heart ache and led to my sleepless nights in Paris,’ he says.
The painting is filled with angst. It seems that the male figure on the left panel is being attacked by creatures with sharp-beaked faces, reminiscent of terrifying Commedia dell’Arte masks. There are people sleeping rough under blankets, beggars kneeling on the ground, and a hold-up by someone brandishing a gun. The frenetic composition exudes anxiety, and its monochrome palette and simplified, jagged forms recall Picasso’s 1937 cry of despair for Guernica. There are multiple art references here: even without the stencilled words ‘Pompidou’, ‘Louvre’ and ‘Rivoli 59’ (the artist-run space and gallery where Tai Ming-Te held his solo show in 2015), we recognise a slinky striped cat like Picasso’s, and a line of figures from an Egyptian temple frieze; bowler hats flying around in the background irresistibly recall Magritte. This is a lamentation for a lost city of the imagination, the city of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Hemingway and Picasso. The artist’s alter-ego looks bewildered and lost, holding his tourist tchotchke in front of his genitals like a talisman. An enormous if somewhat endearingly child-like spider beside him adds to the menace, and so do the skulls that reference the 1980s paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist much admired by Tai Ming-Te: he identifies a connection between himself and the New York painter in their mutual love of a freely handled, scribbly line, and their lexicon of personal signs and symbols. The sharply pointed, beak-like nose of the carnival mask recurs in many of Tai’s paintings, as does a female figure wearing a wide, stiff skirt, like a Velasquez Infanta. She appears here too, balancing, on the right-hand side of the triptych, the male figure on the left: has she borrowed an African mask from Picasso, or the face from Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’?
Drawing directly onto his canvas, Tai juxtaposes and overlaps his sketches, before he emulates the printmaking process by using vinyl stencils that he sticks to his canvas, draws his shapes and then cuts –– ‘like a surgeon,’ Tai says. Large blocks of blue and blue-grey were applied as underpainting by dabbing watered-down pigment directly onto the cut-out stencilled shapes to create an effect reminiscent of Chinese ink painting. Many of the smaller forms, lines and words were also made with stencils in in this way, emulating the appearance of a woodblock print. Tai Ming-Te admires Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige and their depictions of the ‘floating world’, as well as the folk-art traditions of lunar New Year paintings and calligraphy couplets. Negative spaces are filled with rhythmically repeated lines or spermatozoa shapes, emphasising the push and pull between foreground and background. The shallow, compressed pictorial space and long horizontal format makes Sleepless in Paris seem frieze-like; it recalls a strip of black and white film running through a projector, frame by frame. Disconcerting events happen in a sequence as the protagonist, a rather nervous flâneur, out of his comfort zone, strolls Parisian boulevards in the middle of the night.