TRUC-ANH

Distinctly urban, dynamic and contemplative, Truc-Anh is a Vietnamese-French artist who has worked with a range of media that includes photography, video, drawing, sculpture and performance. More recently, he has been devoting considerable attention to the medium of painting. Believing that contemporary urban life is saturated with easy-to-consume images where people fall into passive modes of viewing, Truc-Anh sees within painting the potential to challenge how the world is viewed. Through painting, a historically revered art form, Truc-Anh encourages beholders to engage, pause and ponder what is made visible through careful layers of applied pigments. As painting goes beyond being merely derivative of everyday reality, it offers the potential to create unexplored, unstable worlds that invite further meditation.

Truc-Anh takes full advantage of painting’s capacity to go beyond reality. His works are filled with ambiguous forms and narratives that destabilize our initial perceptions. Despite the ambiguity of the signs presented in his oeuvre, his paintings are not quite abstract. While painting offers a kind of freedom of creation, the majority of Truc-Anh’s work remains decidedly figurative. With a somber and straightforward palette, his brushstrokes of black and white paint merge to form faces, figures and beasts. These recognizable symbols allow viewers to attach to something tangible in his work. Once this attachment is made, visual perception is questioned. While his new work consists of canvases of similar size, his style ranges from a black and white hyperrealist rendering of a monster in L’Adolescent

to the more colourful, yet concealed self-portrait in 14 ans.