Truc-Anh

“Painting is an absolute medium to think about the world and also to read and compare human history through [various] ages, styles and convictions. I try to begin a painting as if it was the first one. I want to free my mind of known techniques, methods and habits.” Distinctly urban, dynamic and contemplative, Truc-Anh is a Vietnamese-French artist who works in a range of media that includes photography, video, drawing, sculpture and performance. Recently, he has been focusing considerable attention to the medium of painting wishing to challenge our modern condition of passive viewing. Through his paintings, Truc-Anh encourages viewers to actively engage, pause and ponder what is made visible through careful layers of applied pigments. Truc-Anh’s paintings are not derivative of everyday reality, but offer the potential to create unexplored, unstable worlds that invite further meditation. His works explore the duality of the image, and the possibilities of belief and contradiction that lie therein. Employing mechanisms of destabilization, more specifically the coupling of the material with the immaterial, of paint and fiction, Truc-Anh presents a fractured world in his work. Drawing upon a range of references from art history to contemporary culture, the presumed direct relationship between the viewer and the work betrays a tenuous hold.