THE DISOBEDIENCE OF THE RANDOM

Millennia-old rules dictated that the artist should only apply the exhaustively trained brush to the paper once the complete scene was set on his mind. The completion was then an act of dexterity, of technical precision, the flowing arm following the hand, obedient to mental command. Such was the practice for thousands of years - the knowledge of the external world overbearing artistic creation, even if itself governed by other wisdoms and philosophies, from Taoism to Buddhism.

Then, one day, came the moment for disobedience, because knowledge - as wisdom - doesn't end in the inaction of academism but is renewed on the paths of inquiry, investigation and, some times, of a particular attention to the random.

Lok Tai Tong decided to forget what he had learnt, to cultivate an healthy disobedience to rule, to rediscover the concept of Art in an increasingly smaller world, where we all touch each other.

After mastering the play between the brush, the ink and the paper, he deviates from the figure or the landscape, that he is able to render so well, to come into the pure field of form, adding to randomness the wisdom of a re-mastered technique which is lead to a point of almost self-generation of form, bringing up fantastic scenarios, towards a level zero of academic knowledge giving way to an openness to pure form, still the fundamental pillar of any painting.

However, as if this alone wouldn't suffice, the artist encloses his works in bell-jars forming triptychs in which the central piece is a mirror, a sort of temporary return to an appearance of reality, a further step in provocation more remarkable even than the disobedience .

All said, this exhibition by Lok Tai Tong deservedly elects, from my point of view, the work of a an artist of multiple facets who having chosen a contemporary artistic language leaps with great consistence into the adventure of pure form, indescribable landscape where disobedience reigns, obedient solely to the order of the ordered randomness.

António Conceição Júnior