Enter Art Fair

 

Alexander Skats and Gao Xintong engage in a dialogue between permanence and flux—between the stillness of a captured moment and the ceaseless movement of thought and energy. Their dual presentation at Enter Art Fair reveals a powerful juxtaposition: Skats freezes cinematic fragments in time, transforming ephemeral digital images into deeply layered oil paintings, while Gao channels the intangible rhythms of being, creating vivid abstractions that embody movement, breath, and flow.

 

Skats’ practice reflects on the nature of images in the digital era, drawing from a vast archive of visual culture—art history, film, and popular media. His paintings distill and refine singular motifs, altering their scale and composition to extract them from their original context. By removing extraneous details, he emphasizes the iconicity of an image, engaging with collective memory and the way contemporary culture consumes and recalls visual material. Painted with the precision and depth of Old Master techniques, his works carry the weight of history while confronting the transitory nature of digital imagery. In this tension, Skats invites the viewer to pause, reconsider, and reimagine.

 

Gao Xintong’s work, in contrast, is a meditation on motion itself—a visual articulation of the unseen forces that shape perception and space. Deeply influenced by Taoist philosophy, his abstract compositions capture the flow of "qi," a vital energy that surges through nature and consciousness alike. Through layered brushstrokes and luminous color, his paintings embody a state of perpetual unfolding, where movement is both a physical and spiritual phenomenon. He describes his process as the pursuit of a ‘natural’ flow—an intentional yet organic emergence that mirrors the rhythms of thought and existence.

 

Together, Skats and Gao present a poetic duality: the frozen frame and the infinite stream, the constructed image and the intuitive gesture, the weight of memory and the ephemerality of being. Their works inhabit the space between stillness and movement, revealing the interdependence of the two. Through this interplay, their exhibition becomes an invitation—to linger, to drift, and to witness the pulse of time itself.