Zwitterion: Ruben Pang

Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to present Zwitterion, the first massive Ruben Pang’ solo show in Europe.

Guided by an intense curiosity and almost fanatical beliefs in painting, the artist takes each exploration beyond his comfort zone as a necessary personal challenge, and demonstrates a similar attitude in international residencies. Each trip is taken as a possibility to absorb a piece of our contradictory reality, and processing it through introspection.

Looking back to 2012, when “Deep S.E.A. – Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia” show was conceived, and Ruben Pang was just the promising youngest talent among twelve elder profiles, today Primo Marella Gallery is sincerely proud to share with you the fulfilment of a goal set four years ago when we first began working together.

Zwitterion comprises a series of spontaneous paintings and ceramic sculptures. The point of departure was Seneca's composition on Providence, part of his series of moral essays which encourage taking the path of resistance and having faith that above suffering and difficulty is an overarching guidance. His allegories of coming of age are often paired with images of surgery, mutilation and other visceral manipulation of flesh and emotion.

Ruben Pang wanted to explore this transcendence of the body and consciousness through an imaginary realm he has created and chemically called Zwitterion: zwitterion is a compound with no overall electrical charge, but which contains separate parts that are positively and negatively charged.

According to his words “the scenes in which the characters within Zwitterion live are compositions of non-linear narratives: these paintings are my way to easing myself into new ways of breaking away from dualities and self imposed rules and strict technical control, while trying to maintain a degree of finesse. I hope the negotiation between these polarized notions creates a narrative that could allow audiences to experience what I experience while painting: the tightrope sensation and an introspective yet infectious anxiety”.

Pang is hereby focusing on fleeting internal conflicts of the human existence, the ones that fall through the cracks: our ambivalence in raising children (Cradle Me Bravely), power play within family relationships leading to sexual tension (Eromenos--Role Reversal), the desire to transform ourselves, to fantasize about who we could become, cannibalizing our heroes or destroying our own image through anorexia or delusion (Gorging is Never Gentle, Hyacinth Girl). These are themes that are particularly difficult to address within a frame, or a linear narrative, because they reside so often in the subconscious, behind facial expressions, and we have to read between the lines of what is usually said in a conversation. “I'm trying to take these little stories and put them together as characters on a stage or film set, because primarily they inspire compositions for paintings”, Pang explains.