Xingze Li and Sarah Pater: Extraordinarily quotidian

Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a close follower of the emerging art core in South Brooklyn, I seldom miss an exhibition at Yi Gallery. Its shows are invariably interesting and novel, perfectly and poetically installed. The primary space is currently featuring a nicely integrated two-person show of Xingze Li and Sarah Pater’s work, with individual exhibitions for each artist in the back. 

Xingze Li’s work occupies the softly lit intersection between the painting of Vermeer and the photography of Uta Barth. His pictures also possess a discrete, sculpted objecthood. Digitized images of shifting light and subtle color are mounted on floating aluminum panels – a winning combination of indoor atmospherics and crisp metal edges. The internal structure of Li’s photographs has something in common with the seemingly ordinary, contemplative Eastern forms of painter John McLaughlin. This puts Li in interesting territory: he presents a kind of theology of light.

Like Barth at times, Li tends to direct his lens inwardly, towards the most ordinary aspects of his own living space, such as empty walls or nondescript fixtures – the vacancies most people do not ponder. 

Yet his images can also allude more mysteriously to outdoor phenomena. He makes deft use of ovals within squares and other images within ovals, centering them like the eyes of storms. This is his first time presenting images printed on elliptically shaped aluminum, and it works very well, morphing what could abstractly reference an outdoor weather event into something uncannily like an intimate cameo portrait.

Pater too is comfortable straddling figuration and abstraction. Her two Mask paintings initially seem abstract, but, like Li’s pieces, operate a bit like portraits.

Her more overtly figurative work is historically informed and markedly precise, subtly encoding sixteenth-century Dutch still life painting in contemporary terms. Her still lives, I suspect, constitute a kind of self-portraiture, or perhaps a narrative of the quotidian. At the same time, she seems to favor an image that looks like an embossed circle chronicling the phases of the moon, which to my mind has universal appeal.

Li and Pater are very different artists, but they have overlapping concerns. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of the recent earthquake and solar eclipse, climatic references seem inescapable in both artists’ work. Pater and Li share a penetrating gaze that makes the overlooked or ordinary, extraordinary.

“Here, Before and After Me: Xingze Li + Sarah Pater,” Yi Gallery, 254 36th Street, B634, Brooklyn, NY. Through May 11, 2024.

About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn based abstract painter who writes on art.