Abstract at the In-Between: ‘Khúc LACHRIMAE’
Hoàng Dương Cầm at Galerie Quynh
By Dương Mạnh Hùng
‘Khúc LACHRIMAE’, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh.
Abstract painting, which began taking roots in Southern Vietnam, particularly Saigon, in the 1950s and 1960s, has long been hailed as a symbol for innovation and modernisation in pictorial art. Pursued by many painters then and now, particularly members of the now-defunct Sáng Tạo group such as Đinh Cường, Thái Tuấn, Tạ Tỵ, Duy Thanh, and Ngọc Dũng, the language of abstract painting is perceived as a raison d’être, an end-goal for both personal and national artistic endeavours. Abstract painting in Vietnam, a tree transplanted to foreign soil, has begot fruits with somewhat similar façade, yet exuding such a different flavour and spirit than those born on its Euro-American homeland. This spirit of abstraction has continued flowing until now, through many undulations, and crystalised within a few contemporary painters whose devotion to it remains steadfast. Hoàng Dương Cam is among those few painters.
Abstract painting was born to create a supernatural space, where color and form are liberated from descriptive functions, thus embracing their autonomy in communication with viewers through influences of intensity, rhythm, and spatiality.
“Abstract painting was born to create a supernatural space, where colour and form are liberated from descriptive functions, thus embracing their autonomy in communication with viewers through influences of intensity, rhythm, and spatiality. ”
‘Khúc LACHRIMAE’, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh.
This objective is beautifully captured by Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: “But “the blank space in an artwork,” someone said, “has no need to be filled up, except by the circumstance of imagination.”[1] Within that scope, Cầm ‘s exhibition at Galerie Quynh is also an assemblage of different series of abstract paintings that he is simultaneously working on; while they differ minutely in terms of color usage or spatial distribution over canvas, upon their combination, they orchestrate a realm of illusive beauty. For this review, I will choose to focus on the works that directly converse with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Music has long been a parallel stream that runs along with painting. Bach himself, toward the end of his life, was also concerned with only two things: variation and polyphony. With fine-tuned ears, Cầm is also an artist who is mesmerised by music: his previous experiments show a mélange between sound and form, music and colour. And now, after having accepted abstract art as his path, Cầm maintains his engagement with music in his artworks, this time classical music, as a source of inspiration to journey with his color and form on the path of constructing captivating layers of an optical illusion on canvas.
“With fine-tuned ears, Cam is also an artist who is mesmerised by music: his previous experiments show a mélange between sound and form, music and colour. And now, after having accepted abstract art as his path, Cam maintains his engagement with music in his artworks, this time classical music, as a source of inspiration to journey with his colour and form on the path of constructing captivating layers of an optical illusion on canvas. ”
Hoàng Dương Cam, ‘Pre-helicopter Era, Michael Rabin in the middle of Dong Thap Muoi or Bach Violin Sonata 1005 Adagio’, 2021, oil on canvas, 195 x 260cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh.
The title ‘Pre-helicopter Era, Michael Rabin in the middle of Dong Thap Muoi or Bach Violin Sonata 1005 Adagio’ (2021) serves as a prelude for that journey, a convergence of non-exhaustive notes in an intricate tune. Employing a palette of mostly pastel tones, Cầm has skillfully combined and juxtaposed them to create spatial contrast - a task that requires a fine sensitivity toward colors as pastel hues are apt to distill into one another, resulting in a pallid ‘flat patch’. His brushstrokes also vary, a spontaneous mixture of short, continuous stubs that signify circular movements, and long, broad strokes that seem to float in a serene blank space. More importantly, the colour and form in the paintings of ‘Khúc LACHRIMAE’ all respond to a musical rhythm — the way the ochre background sinks to suggest depth, or the unevenly serrated line rises to the canvas surface all convey Cầm’s contemplation of a classical music piece. Here, he imagines the scene where violinist Michael Rabin is playing at Đồng Tháp Mười (a region in the Mekong Delta), next to him is the sound of helicopter rotor gathering speed before alighting. The spinning rhythm of the helicopter, a symbol long-attached to the Vietnam War and an object whose models Michael Rabin collected as a pastime, is blended into the bow-on-string movements, all “transmitted” through colour and form to manifest in an abstract space, somewhere between the anterior and posterior, inviting viewers to appreciate it visually and audially.
Hoàng Dương Cam, ‘Kubrick’s Hue Scene or Midori Goto playing Bach’s Chaconne 1004’, 2021, oil on canvas, 200 x 195cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh.
This sense of rhythm is intensified in another work, titled ‘Kubrick’s Hue Scene or Midori Goto playing Bach’s Chaconne 1004’ (2021). Stretched over a chromatically nuanced canvas of pink and periwinkle shades is a scraggly line, vaguely hidden behind dripping orange-yellow stalactites, then partially emerged from under grayish blue precipitation at a corner. Even and outstretched length is ruptured by abrupt dents, which move according to the swish of the bow under Midori Goto’s hand - a violinist who, in Cầm’s opinion, has deconstructed the classical music of Bach and recomposed it under the influence of Butoh theater, where the actors’ movement also fluctuates between long stillness and quick jolts. In this way, Cầm directs the duo of color and form in his dialogue with the violinist’s music and movement; here are two entities that co-exist to create the pictorial abstract space that runs in tandem with real spatial sites in Vietnam. The narratives of history, war, or identity remain present, not pompously proclaimed, but subtly placed in between layers of color and sound. Cầm does not see himself as a researcher, only a creator of spaces where the memory fragments that he gathers can appear and be seen.
‘Khúc LACHRIMAE’, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh.
The abstract space in Cầm’s work always carries the form and rhythm of a roundabout, with multiple elements swirling around in their respective orbit. As if in an irregular galaxy, the small fragments of his paintings move at an interchanging speed, thus generating a velocity potent enough to briefly become asymptotic, before resuming their trajectory. Within those temporary asymptotic moments, everything allows itself to be seen — something akin to a sublime truth, tantalizingly close yet perpetually distanced. Similarly, the closely-packed layers within Cầm’s paintings still remain non-intersectional. The interstices between them are not only where the artist expresses and contemplates, but also where the viewers inch closer toward the world of abstract painting, navigating in narrow trenches between the rhythm of colour and sound, of micro and macro narratives. And Cầm, the painter, continues back and forth within the in-between space, where he finds/allows himself to appear as it is.
‘Khúc LACHRIMAE’ is on view at Galerie Quynh from 12 November to 10 December 2022.
Notes
[1] I Am An Artist, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, trans. By Kong Rithdee, ed. By Roger Nelson and Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, printed in a series of Art Writing published by National Singapore.
About the Writer
Dương Mạnh Hùng is an independent translator/writer/curator. Their practice weaves textual intricacy with visual subtlety to deliver responses and raise questions about art & society. Hung's deep-seated fascination with the dynamics of translation in art is informed by their close observations of global and Southeast Asian socio-political and ecological histories. They are perpetually intrigued by moments of sublimation and serendipitous interstices within/between different arforms.
