Cement Fondu is thrilled to present in the Project Space a newly commissioned solo exhibition by Remy Faint, The Library and the Cave. 

Remy Faint is an emerging Sydney-based artist motivated by the desire to expand languages of painting by examining its global histories. Often exploring the potential of silk as a painting and sculptural device, he references objects and materials specific to his Chinese-Australian heritage.

The Library and the Cave is inspired by Faint’s research into the ‘Library Cave’, a cave complex in northwestern China from which a collection of manuscripts, artefacts and artworks were removed and displaced, now existing as globally dispersed fragments in institutional collections. 

In the exhibition, textile assemblages, paintings on silk, ceramic sculptures and calligraphic imagery converge to create hybridised artefacts and a synthesis of architectural and ornamental forms. By using both rudimentary and digital processes such as ceramic engraving, vector rendering and laser-cutting, as well as layering painterly imagery and semi-transparent silk, Faint’s works collage and blend together disparate fragments from the Library Cave’s displaced collection.

Enacted through Faint’s expanded painting practice, the exhibition mirrors the diversity of language and life recounted in the manuscripts of the ‘Library Cave’. Ornamental brackets, for instance, appear reminiscent of Australian Federation-period roof finials, evoking forms of cross-cultural mediation that are specific to Faint’s Chinese-Australian heritage. 

The Library and the Cave appears in the Project Space until 23 July, complementing Things that are real: Alvaro Barrington X Dean Cross in Cement Fondu’s main gallery.  

Read the catalogue essay for The Library and the Cave by Yuna Lee below.