Black Painting No. 52
2008 - Painting (Painting)
130 x 110cm
Nguyen Thai Tuan
In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war. They evoke the absence of oneself, corporal dispossession but also the story of a society still under authoritarian power. In this way, the absence of faces symbolically refers to censorship. The painted characters are overall described in a typology: the only thing we know is if they are men or women; monks, prisoners, or soldiers. The monochrome background accentuates the theatrical aspect of the composition that stages puppets and ghosts. Some of the paintings seem to develop a narration that is left pending, incomplete. Photography is a manifest reference in the series: testimony to what has occurred, inexorably related to death, absence and loss. The black or dark background creates a space where memory can arise, a space where the stories still need to be written; but also a negative space. “Obscurity always reveals mystery and the unknown. Obscurity forces us to search further and look for the truth, but also creates fear and violence” (Nguyen Thai Tuan).
Nguyen Thai Tuan was born in 1965, he studied at the school of Fine Arts of Hue where he studied propaganda art, which he got bored of very quickly. He is one of the most important Vietnamese artists of his generation that remained and worked in his country, while many other artists were trained in the United States. His work questions the history and fragility of humanist values and the affirmation of subjectivity in opposition to political power. He produced several series of paintings, among which is Heritage that shows in the background buildings and monuments related to Vietnamese history. He seeks to portray a critical space between the past and the present.
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