TRAN VAN THAO
“Painting is a way of feeling existence and also a way of forgetting its pain.” Tran Van Thao is an artist who finds beauty in the unruliness of life, and who expresses his awe of such unpredictability though abstract art. Influenced by American Abstract Expressionism, Thao plays with line and colour, rejoicing in possibilities as serendipitous as those that life throws in our paths.
Tran Van Thao is one of Vietnam’s foremost abstract painters, although his subject matter can be grounded and concrete. The city, his family, and surrounding landscapes are a source of inspiration for him as much as the vagaries of the human condition.
Thao’s life-affirming work can be raw with primitivist markings or rich with colour fields. Veils of oil paint, scrumbled areas of depth, papier-mâché, collage and brazen linear shapes are all basic ingredients of his stylistic repertoire. Vitality is ever present.
The paintings in the ‘April’ series are perhaps some of the artist’s most spare and direct works. Here we see Saigon, a tropical location in which April closes the hot season and ignites the fresh joy of the monsoons. The paintings, like the cleansing rain, communicate optimism in a pure and uncomplicated manner. His self-assured use of modest materials such as pencil and oil pastel, used with childlike oblivion, strengthen the artist’s polished compositions.
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