Sorrowing Man

Xinyi Cheng's Sorrowing Man confronts us, head-on, with the grief of a man, depicted naked, immersed in darkness and consumed in an intimate turmoil.

Like a melancholic landscape, in the manner of the Romantic painters, the tormented and dark background of the painting, in which a storm of long white strokes surrounds the figure, shows a man beside himself, his face hidden in his hands.
As in many of her works, Xinyi Cheng (born in 1989 in China and living between Shanghai and Paris), captures a gesture, a face, a moment: a cigarette between the lips, a man bringing his mouth to a jet of water, hands protecting a flame... She represents ordinary situations, a sum of small gestures and strives to capture halos, reflections, bursts of water, and flames—as many unstable and unsettling states. Cheng often tightens the frame of her paintings and is inspired by photography to imagine small format paintings, like intimate fragments.

This work by Xinyi Cheng is presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition "Ouverture" at the Bourse de Commerce in 2021.