陈池瑜（清华大学美术学院教授 博士生导师）
20世纪中国美术的一个最突出的现象，是油画这个舶来艺术品种成为最重要的画种之一，20世纪初的近30年中，中国新建了近20所美专或艺专，开始培养油画学生，油画风格经历了写实、象征、古典等阶段。在30年代初，在上海曾出现现代主义创作思潮，80年代中期，在中国再一次掀起现代主义绘画思潮。90年代以来，青年画家们开始追求个性化的表现方法，并开始吸收影像、电脑设计等手法，进行新的创作。90年代以来成长起来的年轻油画家，感觉更加灵敏，思维方式更具有当代性。彭麒就是90年代成长起来的优秀青年画家之一。
彭麒在美术学院本科和研究生阶段，在素描训练和造型能力方面打下了坚实的基础，但他并不满足于写实画风，而是在想象构形方面着力，他创作的头像系列，以风格化的手法研究各种人物面部表现的种种神态，仿佛是一部社会众生形态库，这些作品预示着他要走一条属于自己的个性化艺术道路。
彭麒是一位具有灵性和才华的画家。他积极地表现着周围的世界，但他并不是去复制这个世界的具体物象，而是用心灵去感觉，用思维去创造新的物象，也就是说，彭麒羞于将客观世界中的人、动物及物象直接描绘。而是将其转换成想象中的梦幻影像。
彭麒对小动物尤为关注，他说，一直以来，那些仿佛会说话的精灵总在脑海中跳舞。他似乎在用心灵和这些小精灵对话，他以捕捉到他们为创作的乐趣。他描绘的这些小精灵有猫、狗、猴、猪、蝴蝶等，生动而富有情趣。他用单色为背景，使动物的形象特征更为强烈。这些小精灵有些憨厚、有些机智、有的被夸张变形、有的朦胧，每一张作品，都是一种生命的形式。他用两年时间，画了一百张小精灵，画面闪烁的是一种生命力和童趣。这些小精灵成为彭麒创作的灵感来源，对生命和童稚的探询正是他创作的原始动力。
彭麒在湖北求学时，受到楚文化浪漫主义艺术的熏陶，崇拜凤鸟的楚先民创造了绚烂的漆艺术，漆艺的造型和色彩开启了彭麒的艺术想象力。彭麒以凤凰作为对象创作了一组想象丰富的作品，凤鸟被意向化，画面流光溢彩，创造了一个旋转流离的想象世界，用笔的书写性既使画面流动自如，又带有强烈的东方艺术精神特征。凤凰组画，是吸收中国浪漫主义创作方法加以新的有益试验的积极成果。
彭麒还对20世纪西方抽象主义进行研究，尝试运用抽象手法进行新的创造。他的抽象画有的具有表现性特征，“随手万变，任心所成”是他神往的创作状态。他将中国书法运笔的自由灵动和线条流转融入画中，使其抽象画带有书写的特点。此外他将设计的某些因素引入抽象画中，画面和色彩富有装饰与构成的形式美感。这些作品无疑是当代抽象画新的收获。
彭麒的创作手法是多样的，这反映了当代青年画家追求创作多样体验的愿望。他的大幅精灵题材画，运用蠕动转曲的笔触和多样和谐的色彩，造成一种视幻影像效果，观者可从画面恍惚的色彩中感知猫、麒麟等形象意趣，在他的作品中视幻与隐喻统一于一体。《闪耀的身体》系列，人体被梦幻化、虚拟化，这些人体被舞动的彩带所缠绕、所隐蔽。作者受《山海经》等中国古代神话所启示，大胆创造出人身猫首的怪异形象。这组作品具有强烈的抽象表现特点，也是作者对人的身体本质的艺术哲学思考。人身的本体与遮蔽交织在一起不可分割，人与动物相异又相连。这组画是新世纪青年画家对人体本身思考与表现的富有意义的佳构。
彭麒在创作技法上，将传统的油画绘制方法同丙烯、印刷媒介、电脑设计思维方式相结合，将油画手绘质感和肌理与网络和数字艺术相结合，力求创造出富有时代特征的新的绘画样式。在色彩表现上，追求虚拟、光电构成的色彩效果，以区别于以往绘画中对自然状态下色彩的摹写。彭麒用这些方法为我们创造了富有个性特征和风格样式的绘画作品。
彭麒还很年轻，他在油画创作上极富潜力和前程！
The Illusive Shadow of the Art of Feeling and Imagination:
Oil Paintings by Peng Qi
By Chen Chiyu
Professor and Doctoral candidate Instructor, School of Fine Arts, Tsinghua University
A most prominent phenomenon for the 20th century Chinese fine arts is that the imported oil painting became one of the dominant forms in painting arts. During the first thirty years of the century, nearly twenty art schools were established and began to produce students majoring in oil painting. The painting style experienced different phases of realism, symbolism and classicism. In the middle of 1980s a trend of modernist thoughts surged. From the 1990s on the young generation of artists started to absorb methods from the computer imagery design for innovation, whose senses are more acute and ways of thinking more contemporary. Mr. Peng Qi is one of these brilliant new artists after the 1990s.
During Peng Qi’s undergraduate and postgraduate studies, a solid foundation was laid by himself regarding the sketch and profiling skills. However, he was not satisfied with the realist style but focused on imagination. His Portrait Series, like a storehouse for human morphs from all walks of life, studies people’s facial looks in stylized methods. These works of his forecasted his own personalized road of an artist.
Peng Qi is an intelligent and talented artist. He positively portrays the world around him not by mere duplicating but through feelings from the soul and through thinking. Putting it another way, he is shy at depicting people, animal and things of the material world directly, but would rather transform them into images in dreams and illusions.
He pays special attention to small animals. As he put it, these elves are as if always talking and dancing one’s mind. He seems to be talking to these little beings through his soul and experiencing great joy in capturing them in his compositions. The little animals portrayed by him include cats, dogs, monkeys, pigs and butterflies, lively and interesting. He uses one colour for the background in order to make the images of the animals more intense. Some of these little elves are simple and honest, some are intelligent, some exaggerated and transformed, some obscure. Each piece of these works is a form of life. He spent two years on 100 pieces of them, each one glaring with vitality and childlike delight. These little elves became a major source of innovation of Peng’s composition. The inquisition about life and innocence is the primeval force of his creation.
When pursuing studies in Hubei, Peng was deeply affected by the romantic art of the Chu culture. His artistic imagination was inspired by the lacquer painting profile and colour of the ancient Chu people who worshipped Phoenix and created extraordinary lacquer painting art. He later composed a series of works in the theme of Pheonix. The Pheonix bird is idealized by glaring colours in a vortical drifting world. The paintings are mobilized by the narrating brush, full of spiritual characteristics of oriental art. The Phoenix series is a positive achievement by applying methods in the Chinese Romanticism into new practice.
Beside, Peng also did research on the western abstractionism and is trying to make use of it in new compositions. To be able to draw multifariously by following his heart is the mood he dreams of for his composition. He dissolves the freedom and flexibility of lines in traditional Chinese calligraphy into his paintings, making them carry the character of calligraphy writing. Additionally, he introduced some elements in designing into the abstract paintings, giving the general appearance of the painting a decorative esthetics. Without any doubt these works of art must be among the new achievements of modern abstractionism.
His means of artistic creation is various, which reflects the wish possessed by contemporary young artists to have different experiences during artistic creation. His large productions of the elves theme create an effect of hallucination, through wriggling touch of brush and harmonious colours, in which the viewers vaguely perceive the images of cat, Qilin(a chimerical and auspicious animal in Chinese culture) and so on. In his works, visual hallucination is united with metaphor. In the Glaring Bodies series, human bodies are illusionary and virtualized by being intertwined and concealed by colourful stripes. Inspired by the ancient Chinese fairy tales such as Shan Hai Ching, the author boldly creates the weird image of man’s body with cat’s head. The abstract expression of this series reflects his thought on the essence of human body in terms of artistic philosophy. The human bodies are interwoven with coverings, neither of which is separable from the other. Man and animal are different and yet connected. The series forms a meaningful fine construction out of thoughts on human body and its expression by a young artist of the new millennium.
As for techniques, Peng combines traditional oil painting methods with ideas from acrylic, printing media and computer aided design arts, blending texture of oil painting with digital art, in order to produce a new type of painting with characters of a new era. In terms of colour expression, virtual and photoelectric effects are pursued so as to differ from copying colours in their natural state in the past of painting. With these methods, Peng creates a personal and stylized art of painting for us.
He is young, and full of potentials on his way of oil painting composition.
