到灯塔去 To the lighthouse

There was the silent apparition of an ashen-colored ship for instance, come, gone……It was difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish their significance in the landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within.

——Virginia Woolf To the lighthouse

Gao Runsheng has suspended the image problem for three years, which developed from photographic real in the reflection to plane cutting. He has always been exploring the painting direction on purity by getting rid of something that has nothing to do with painting and exploring the visual abstraction in the night. For this reason, his own life and spirit has been through a long periods of instability and division. I called it: “Cézanne pain”.Once he called me and said, he just wanted to have a chat. Then he told me that maybe he needed a psychologist. However, his constant attempts made me see the philosophical significance of his works. It seems like the suspension meaning of Cézanne space discovered by Mero Ponti. Due to the surrealist superposition that seems to beyond images and Cézanne doubt involved, Gao has completed the steady use of visual puns after three years of nearly self-closed exploration: the rhymes of lines and spaces that have been clearly defined in his mind.

To the lighthouse. Gao's state of psychological doubt and even melancholy , which every step of exploration that approaching purity, in my opinion, is the painting version of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: Every slight changes of Gao’s style is like a stream of consciousness with the lapse of time, removing unnecessary elements that irrelevant to painting, but retaining the essence: painting itself.

From Cézanne space to Mondrian, the painting itself that Gao Runsheng explores is close to pure academic inquiry and rational advancement. Based on this, painting content is no longer important : David's head or David's eyes, which were repeated over and over in college. Therefore, he was deeply inspired by Cezanne's space and lines in Oriental painting, but rather than being inspired, it is better to say that he encountered the same difficulties as Cézanne, but ultimately won in doubt.

As the lines gradually spread into a beautiful spirit, Gao Runsheng could finally breathe a sigh of relief, for he has expressed the eternal light of painting itself.