21 October – 23 November 2013

Thaddaeus Ropac presented its first exhibition by Chinese-born French artist Yan Pei-Ming. The exhibition Help! was built around several of the artist’s characteristic genres. Portraits, history painting and vanities were presented on the three floors of our Marais gallery.

In the main gallery space, the secular themes of war and peace came face to face in both a dialectical and a painterly confrontation. On the gallery’s other two floors were works on paper, and an iconic figure is the subject of oil portraits.

Yan Pei-Ming summoned up immediate history through careful observation of media images. His transformation of these images into huge-scale oil paintings gave a historical dimension to current affairs that is reminiscent of the scandal that greeted Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. The beholder was confronted by the immediacy of an image of historical potential. But the absence of distance gives rise to doubt, to questions and emotion. The exhibition Help! took on themes peculiar to 'history painting' as well as themes taken from significant current events like the war in Libya or scenes of land and air combat.

“I am reminded once again of Manet and Goya as I stand in front of these works by Yan Pei-Ming – of them more than any other artist because of their constant evocation of the disasters of war, the use of black and white, their devotion to painting. (…) After Marat, lying murdered on the white linen of his bathtub, the procession of the executed and the assassinated stretches forth: Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald, John and Robert Kennedy, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Aldo Moro, Martin Luther King, the good and the evil, all on their way, with holes in their bodies, naked, all labelled for the morgue. Always the same story, Yan Pei-Ming tells us. But the story needs its teller, someone with the stature to draw it all together, to pin it down and denounce it, using the tried and tested weapon of paint.” – Henri Loyrette, foreword of the exhibition catalogue