International Business Traveller

Mo Maurice Tan

September 12 th - November 7 th 2009

Native of Singapore, Mo Maurice Tan likes exchanging his painter’s clothes for the suit of the businessman. So he can deliver us his impressions on the world of megacities, highways, stations… From lounges of airports to rooms of hotels, from New York to Tokyo, Paris or London, his journey diary is inspired by conversations stolen from business lunches and it describes the rumour of hotels and hall platforms atmospheres.

The painter tries to understand how these men and women, eat, sleep, move and watch for the next plane. His « labels of life » seized from a taxi restore his glance of architect put on the city to sublimate it or criticize it.

The characters flooded in the townscape, evolve in a ghostly anonymity. His architectural perspectives make our head spin. His palette reduced to a range of grey confers an almost tactile thickness on concrete walls, symbols of modernity of megacities.

The coulures of his paintings makes the city « ooze », freezled then in space and time, as suspended within a too fast evolution. The artist reveals admirably the tensions of the big cities and the microscopic solitude of its inhabitants.

However, Mo Maurice Tan remains influenced by the Chinese culture and its reproductions of landscape. His frames typical in his way, try to eliminate by the white colour, that is by the empty space, the elements which he proposes to the eye. Oscillating between tradition and modernity, he leaves us in the icy atmosphere of a cutting light, which cuts high rises from a fitting of geometrical masses.

Animated by a feeling of fascinated aversion, Mo Maurice Tan looks for the place of the man in the immoderation of the contemporaries urban spaces.