Xinyi Cheng: new darling in Paris

A lot in demand in Europe, she simply retains accumulating exhibitions. After hanging her works on the walls of the François Pinault Trade Change, it's at Lafayette Anticipation that they'll now be visible. Thus revealing her genius to the curious who come to intoxicate themselves with the expertise of the well-known Xinyi Cheng.

Five years after her arrival in Paris, Xinyi Cheng is among the most trendy Chinese artists of our time. François Pinault, the legendary collector and proprietor of Christie’s, says she is “an exquisite artist”; the truth is, her works – whose colour work is exceptional, whose magnified intimacy is hanging, whose moments of life are of a disturbing simplicity, and whose strategy shouldn't be without recalling the genius of a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Picasso or a Degas – are extensively celebrated. The eyes rivet on her paintings, the mind wanders. Her brushstrokes make the viewer need to imagine an entire life for these strangers introduced on the canvas, so robust are the feelings. These “strangers” are in reality the artist’s buddies. She confided in an interview given to La Bourse du Commerce, on the occasion of her exhibition, that she paints moments that she has in mind, that she imagines, and typically reminiscences. She then asks a good friend to pose in her studio in Belleville and takes a mess of photographs that may function a foundation for her first pencil sketches. And when she lastly grabs her brush, it is the work with oil colors that she finds most enjoyable. For her, that is how she transmits the emotions and the human dimension of her work. She paints a easy however fascinating gesture, like lighting a cigarette, with a sensitivity and a poetry overflowing, because of her outstanding method. A boundless expertise that succeeds in aiming on the heart with accuracy. And if the experience of seeing her work in real life has not but been attempted, the Lafayette Anticipation Foundation will present its first major exhibition, bringing together some thirty works produced between 2016 and 2021. Will probably be a chance to immerse oneself in Xinyi Cheng’s universe, the place emotions, want, and human relationships reign in the biggest intimacy.