Exhibition · Tang Contemporary Art · Hong Kong
The title We Paint What You Might See reflects a shared impulse among Ben Ashton, Jochen Mühlenbrink and Ivan Pokidyshev: to treat painting not as a transparent record of the visible world, but as a deliberate reshaping of its surface. Each artist works from a position of technical mastery, yet none allows that mastery to settle into simple representation. Instead, they place both the physical act of seeing and the psychological process of perception under quiet pressure, opening a space where what appears is never exactly what is there. At the heart of their practices lies a philosophical tension between the physical and the perceived. The eye registers colour, form, texture and light. The mind, however, constantly interprets, completes and sometimes resists what it receives. These three artists play deliberately in that gap. They remind us that seeing is never purely optical. It is also psychological, shaped by expectation, memory, trust and doubt. Ben Ashton draws on the authoritative language of classical portraiture, its confident postures, refined surfaces and historical weight, only to fracture it. Having long studied the Old Masters, he introduces digital style glitches and formal ruptures that unsettle the very qualities of power, self assurance and historical certainty those images once sought to fix. The figures remain recognisable, yet the authority they project is compromised. Physically, the surface of the painting is disrupted. Psychologically, our confidence in the image begins to slip. What we thought we knew becomes provisional. This disruption of visual certainty finds a different expression in the work of Jochen Mühlenbrink. Working in the tradition of trompe l’œil, he turns fogged glass, condensation, residual marks and the reflective plane of the mirror into sites of hyperreal illusion. Through varnish, resin and acrylic on mirror glass, he constructs surfaces so convincing that the eye momentarily accepts them as physical rather than…