There exists a dimension of painting where time stratifies until it becomes matter, solidifying slowly into dense visions capable of condensing an entire interior universe into minimal spaces, evoking it by fragments in all its complexity. The poetics of Bu Shi (Yunnan, 1993), to whom CAR Gallery in Bologna dedicates a second solo exhibition three years after his debut show, is situated in this dilated temporal dimension, inhabiting an ambiguous threshold between maniacal control of form and visionary madness of content, in open counter-tendency to the productive frenzy prevailing today in contemporary art. The title Brace in Bocca (Embers in the mouth), inspired by the Preta of Buddhist cosmology, voracious spirits whose mouths transform every food into burning embers, alludes to a condition of lack that painting cannot appease but only make visible. The artist translates his “hunger” into figurative compositions of obsessive precision, where every element seems to blaze with a mysterious independent intensity that disturbs the apparent quietude of the surface in every centimeter.
Bu Shi, “Brace in bocca”, installation view at CAR Gallery, Bologna, courtesy CAR Gallery
The first element that emerges when observing the new series of temperas on panel presented here, whose small format suggests assimilation to secular reliquaries, is the chromatic turn: while in previous works a deep black dominated, absorbing light and creating twilight and melancholic atmospheres, now the works ignite with reds declined in a vast range of tonalities (ranging from carmine to cherry red, from brilliant vermilion to reddish browns fading toward black), as if the darkness had been torn by the glimmers of a blood-red sunset, illuminating from within the small theaters of existence depicted by the painter. Red, according to Chinese tradition a bearer of multiple meanings linked to fortune, joy, passion and desire, here assumes a more complex and contradictory valence, evoking simultaneously burning vitality and consuming embers, the warmth of life and the fire that devours. The meticulousness of Bu Shi’s pictorial technique, in which ancient and laborious procedures derived from both Eastern and Western tradition converge, rather than pure technical virtuosity as it might appear at first glance, is the vehicle of an expressive urgency that manifests itself precisely in its negation, in the impossibility of representing instantaneously what requires a temporal sedimentation analogous to that of memory or dream.
Bu Shi, “Blossoms”, 2025, tempera on wooden panel, 33 x 47 x 3,5 cm, courtesy CAR Gallery
The exhibited works identify cryptic liminal settings between interior and exterior, between the closed space of the Wunderkammer and the opening toward landscapes that seem simultaneously real and fictitious. The placement in imaginary miniaturized landscapes of objects belonging to the artist’s personal collection portrayed from life constitutes the principal distinctive cipher of Bu Shi’s poetics: his panels attempt the impossible enterprise of reducing the multiplicity of the world to manageable dimensions, enclosing scraps of reality in protected spaces where every element can be controlled, arranged according to precise compositional criteria and illuminated by specific light. Heads of Buddhist monks, skulls, moths, shells, inlaid eggs, burning candles and other furnishings embellished by painting: each object is reproduced with an almost photographic fidelity to details, yet their combination generates alienating atmospheres, where description thickens the mystery instead of clarifying it. In this process, painting becomes the place of a desire that becomes clear by transforming itself into form in the discipline of a representation that manages to give body to an otherwise ineffable unease.
Bu Shi, “Crepuscolo”, 2025, tempera on wooden panel, 24 x 30 x 3 cm, courtesy CAR Gallery
Compared to previous works, where space tended to close in on itself in an almost claustrophobic dimension, here the compositions look out onto landscapes framed like theatrical scenographies, showing twilight skies crossed by golden clouds, minute zen garden vegetation or expanses of water where small boats float. The declared artificiality of these views confirms their nature as mental constructions, as interior spaces projected toward an exterior always reworked by the same gaze that tries to contain it by miniaturizing it and transforming it into an object of contemplation. The symmetry that governs many compositions, with elements arranged specularly on the sides of a central axis, contributes to creating a sense of unstable equilibrium, of order innervated by an underground tension on the point of manifesting itself. The objects, charged with symbolic valences by their measured arrangement on supports transfigured into domestic altars, suggest the presence of a private and syncretic cult that fuses Buddhist elements with Western allegories, from baroque vanitas to decadent symbolism.
Bu Shi, “L’isola della morte”, 2025, tempera on wooden panel, 19 x 24 x 3,5 cm, courtesy CAR Gallery
Bu Shi seems, therefore, to embrace painting as a personal form of meditation that produces images of inscrutable meaning, through which he constructs visual narratives open to multiple interpretations. The complexity of his interior world, always balanced between rationality and mysticism, between apparent quiet and substantial restlessness, finds in these small panels a mode of expression that maintains all its tension alive. The enigmas of existence that painting interrogates are transformed into sibylline images, in a circular process where the eye of painting continues to scrutinize its own darkness seeking a comprehension that perhaps will never arrive, but which in the act of searching finds its reason for being.
Info:
Bu Shi. Brace in bocca
29/11/2025 – 24/01/2026
Text by Maura Pozzati
CAR Gallery
via Azzo Gardino 14/a, Bologna
www.cargallery.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT