Simon Birch vs Françoise Nielly

Simon Birch has lived in Hong Kong since 1997 and is widely recognized for his large, figurative oil paintings, many of which are held in private collections around the world.






His new exhibition, titled ‘Laughing with a Mouth Full of Blood’. It sounds rather macabre but it’s sure to be well received. After all, Simon is a bit of a Hong Kong darling: up there with the Star Ferry, Char Siu Fan and moaning about pollution.

It follows his mega multi-media show last year, HOPE & GLORY, which was sort of a sci-fi-cum-rave, artistic theme park. This time Simon returns to oil and canvas with an exploration of the human body through figurative paintings that melt into abstraction, conveying fragility and resilience, movement and mindfulness. These new works, characterised by Birch’s distinctive paintwork, map the complex intertwining of pain and pleasure, aversion and desire, decay and growth. The subjects of Birch’s deconstructed portraiture, poised between action and reflection, intimate vulnerability and the threat of human dissolution, even as they hint at the body’s capacity to resist the abstracting gaze of modern science.

When I am looking into the painting by Birch, I instantly think of a French artist – Françoise Nielly.

Françoise Nielly grew up in the South of France where she lived between Cannes and Saint-Tropez – never far from the light, the color sense and the atmosphere that permeates the South of France. This is coupled with her studies with her studies at the Beaux arts and Decorative Arts, and her sense of humor and of celebration.
Nielly currently lives and paints in Paris near Montmartre. She shows and sells her work in Europe, in Canada and in the United States.

It is less than easy today to discuss figurative painting “as such.” One inevitably encounters the question of why, in this age of “big media” the artist has chosen to fall back on methods of representation deemed by some to be obsolete. The traditional method painter is forced to choose between embracing the gadgetry of our times or stubbornly disbuting it by way of exclusion. Each approach carries with it its share of dogma, and what we are left with is a battle for representational supremacy–for the picture of our times, and, hence, for “reality”–with the former post-technological approach usually trumping the latter. But I would testify there is a third category for painters who approach their own art making with a certain indifference toward such oppositions as modern vs. post-modern.

Françoise Nielly & Simon Birch are “such” artists of that kind. Though both of them approach their subjects with the raw psychological intensity, their paintings unabashedly incorporate a design sensibility which could have come from no other place but modern contemporary media. Generally working in large format, in close to medium range to both their figures,

Nielly’s paintings demonstrate focused dexterity and impulse in equal measures. Her abstract works are like Robert Motherwell filtered through a mauve and violet lens. Her figurative paintings reveal a decidedly feminine appreciation for the male body, and a keen apprehension of the supercool aloofness surrounding contemporary fashionistas. Her intersecting slabs of vibrant pigments sometimes adhere to.

Birch’s paintings show people a glimpse of sadness mood. “Kree” is a good demonstration in depicting “such”. Unlike Nielly, the paints that in Birch’s painting is not as noisy and whimsical and bright as Nielly, however, both share and carry with them the cross components of a cosmopolitan style, incorporating fragments of contemporary art culture and imaginatively synthesizing their fine and decorative arts technique.

More blasts of colour by Nielly’s painting is expressive & colouful, splashing and exhibiting a brute force, a fascinating vital energy. And on the other hand, Birch is comparatively like a cool hunter. His painting is allusive, showing the atmosphere of still beauty and peace.

Anyhow, both artists depicts people from a wide range of ethnicities in trippy technicolor. Niether of them does disappoint their promise to remain unique in there series of fantastic artpieces.