Artist Thu-Van Tran @ Almine Rech New York — "In spring, ghosts return" Exhibition

Thu-Van Tran 

In spring, ghosts return 

Almine Rech New York 

May 7 — Jun 15, 2024 

Almine Rech New York, Tribeca presents In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Forming the focal point of her exhibition In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran’s Colors of Grey evokes a world of intense paradox. Vivid hues enact their own negation, their multiplicity eclipsed through their mixing by the emergence of a gray singularity. Differentiation morphs into that which is almost indistinguishable. Begun in 2012 as a poetic reckoning with the so-called Rainbow Herbicides that the United States weaponized against Vietnam during Operation Ranch Hand, the series has taken many forms, from wall-sized frescos to monumental paintings. In her most recent expression, the artist explores expanded vistas on a more intimate scale. These works engage the legacies of Renaissance perspective, 19th-century panoramas, and Christian devotional painting only to subvert them through a meditation on landscape that unfurls across metaphoric and geographical registers.

Arranged at the height of windows with a shared horizon line, the paintings in the exhibition offer a 360-degree view onto a compositionally and conceptually complex miasma of colorful abstraction. Their astounding beauty is rooted in horror. Indeed, the gestural washes that veil the canvas belie the steely logic of Tran’s politically encoded color theory. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed 19 million gallons of chemical weapons onto the jungles of Vietnam. Agent Orange was the most notorious, but Agents White, Blue, Pink, Green, and Purple were also unleashed in an act of chemical warfare that caused decades of ecological and human devastation. Limiting her palette to the colors used to identify these lethal herbicides, Tran paints each color alongside its opposite, gradually producing a shroud of gray pigment that floats above its originally colorful substrate. Her systematic approach results in a painterly negation that poetically figures the trauma of neocolonial occupation. This is a landscape twice abstracted. First, through the familiar gestural marks of nonobjective painting and, second, through the coda waiting to be deciphered in the very colors that Tran initially employs. 

The resulting panoramic installation that encircles the viewer formally echoes a system of visual representation popularized at the height of colonial expansion. Offering the public an immersive, even cinematic viewing experience, the panorama technique was patented in 1787 to instant acclaim. Visitors flocked to spectacles such as the “panorama du commerce” at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, where seamlessly fused canvases hung in the round detailed scenes of colonial trade across the French empire. Commissioned to coincide with the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the panorama was a magnum opus of Orientalist painting. Allegories representing each country left no room for doubt as to the hierarchy of civilizations according to the French: Europe was represented as the arts and architecture, while Asia was reduced to elephants and a hookah. 

Conversely, Tran’s installation works against the panorama’s historical roots in imperialist expansion. Traditional panoramas borrowed a compositional style adopted from military protocols used to survey enemy land. They delivered scenes of heightened realism, typically from a bird’s-eye view. Tran immerses the viewer in a shifting landscape of suggestion and abstraction. Rather than indoctrinating viewers through an illusionistic palimpsest deployed to conceal violent conquest, the artist confronts the perpetual unfolding of imperialist aggression through the enigmatic commingling of color, form, and perception.

In In spring, ghosts return, Tran introduces an additional structural element that mitigates the surveilling mode of observation courted in 19th-century panoramas. Interrupting the revolving pan of paintings are two triptychs, whose triple-paneled format borrows from Christian devotional painting. An altar is a threshold to divine mystery. In the Christian tradition, it illustrates the apotheosis toward which all other elements in the church, such as the stations of the cross, narratively progress. Its appearance here is a reminder of forces greater than the visible world and its conquest. This formal intercession in the rhythm of the panorama suggests space for contemplation. The panoramic effect, in turn, exerts reciprocal pressure on the altarpieces, confounding the notion of chronological time fundamental to the Christian worldview. Rather than an explicit narrative mapped onto an advancing timeline, the horizon line that laces across Tran’s panorama suggests a continual cycle akin to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. In spring, ghosts return reminds us that everything circles back to a point of origin only to begin again.

Tran’s incorporation of altars in the form of dual triptychs invites a spiritual dimension into what might otherwise stand as an exercise in history painting. As the exhibition title suggests, there are ghosts in this landscape. Apparitions coalesce and evanesce in the swirling veils of paint, pointing to mourning, mystery, and the possibility of communion. Tran has previously described her preoccupation with “the melancholy of a shifting landscape into which we must project and construct ourselves.”1  For centuries, Western painting prized various perspectival systems developed in the Renaissance, whose power lay in the promise of projection. These systems relied on the metaphor of the window, placing the viewer in a fixed position relative to the scene before them. A window might provide a view, but Tran’s panorama invites us to choose our own perspective. In this haunted terrain, the act of seeing is also a radical act of reconstruction that forges a future through the vivid condensation of history in the present. 

— Katherine Rochester, PhD, art historian and curator 

1  Hélène Guenin,“Interview: Thu-Van Tran and Hélène Guenin,” in Thu-Van Tran: Nous vivons dans l’éclat, ed. Hélène Guenin (Nice: MAMAC; Paris: Editions Dilecta, 2023),141.

ALMINE RECH NEW YORK

361 Broadway, New York, NY 10013 

www.alminerech.com

Artist Loriel Beltrán @ Lehmann Maupin, London — "To Name the Light" Exhibition

Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light

Lehmann Maupin, London

May 14 – June 22, 2024

Sculpture is durational in a way that painting is not. Painting can be observed in a glance, whereas sculpture has to be explored in time and space. I try to bring this sculptural animation to my wallworks while keeping that “glance” effect of painting. Painting is like a container where everything compresses into this one thing, whereas sculpture expands into more ambiguity.

—Loriel Beltrán

Lehmann Maupin presents To Name the Light, the London debut of Miami-based, Venezuelan-born artist LORIEL BELTRÁN (b. 1985). Featuring five new paintings, including the monumental work Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul), 2024, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s engagement with time––geological, biological, historical, linguistic––as a conceptual framework to explore the phenomenological effects of light, color, and materiality. This exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s fully illustrated catalogue, including an essay by curator Katherine Rochester. 

Loriel Beltrán has become known for his sculptural accumulations that poetically combine aspects of painting and sculpture. Employing custom-made molds and layers of paint, each work is produced through a meticulous process of pouring, embedding, compressing, drying, slicing, and finally assembling each vibrantly pigmented cross section into an abstract composition. Loriel Beltrán’s paintings materialize color in its full complexity in such a way that recalls the work of abstract painter and theorist Joseph Albers (1888-1976), whose exacting investigation of chromatic interaction expanded the possibilities for modern color theory. Albers asserted that “as basic rules of language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over.” Loriel Beltrán has developed his own chromatic language that also incorporates an element of chance in the interplay between material viscosity, gravity, and time. The resulting images are prismatic, as though color and light are emanating from every visual cut / break in the composition.

Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul), 2024, the centerpiece of the exhibition, is the literal and metaphorical collapse and compression of the body of work the artist produced for his recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul. Beltrán has incorporated residual elements and pieces of works from that show into the compressed layers, making the palette a register of prior paintings. Seemingly frozen in a transitional state of becoming and disintegrating, between representation and abstraction, the painting is composed of striated sections of typically discordant pigments––vibrant blues, reds, greens, and yellows are placed next to areas of deep maroons and browns, next to pastel pinks, purples, and blues––to surprising and sometimes technicolor effect. In a recent interview with the artist, curator Katherine Rochester states, “Beltrán's work applies increasing pressure to the distinctions between categories that organize our anthropocentric view of the world. Nature and culture, science and philosophy, language and image, sculpture and painting are all subjected to a series of artistic operations that create new forms from a hybrid use of references and materials. ‘What remains on the other side of total collapse?’” For Loriel Beltrán, it seems that what remains is an endless set of possibilities in the undefined space of perception.

While Total Collapse draws from the artist’s own personal painting history, other works in the exhibition, like Sulfur Aerosol, 2024 and Dark Path / Dark Past, 2024, skillfully traverse art history by exploring the genre of landscape painting, drawing inspiration from the legacy of early 19th-century Romantic painters such as J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. The sense of awe, mystery, and grandeur that Turner and Friedrich sought to invoke in their atmospheric impressions of the natural sublime serve as a touchstone for Loriel Beltrán. While he employs quite different techniques, Beltrán is interested in encouraging a similarly direct viewing experience that connects us with our surroundings on an emotional and spiritual level, inviting the possibility of infinity and wonder into the gallery. In Sulfur Aerosol, Loriel Beltrán depicts an acidic skyscape composed of layers of cotton candy pink, baby blue, and mustard yellow pigment. The surface of the painting vibrates with an alluring and ominous intensity, invoking in the viewer a similar  sense of overwhelm to that induced by contemplation of the rapidly advancing effects of climate change. For Loriel Beltrán, the work is open to a variety of interpretations. He explains, “It has a toxic but seductive quality, the kind we usually get from technology and the idea of ‘progress’ and our curiosity for the next thing.” 

In Dark Path / Dark Past Loriel Beltrán depicts a night scape that is created through an ombre effect––deep maroon transitioning into deep verdant green. Throughout, there are hints of bright yellow, blue, purple, and pink that suggest a scattering of objects, debris, or perhaps even people. The title alludes to the dark path / past of humanity, one marked with a violence that has had an irreparable impact on the landscape. Here as with the other works in the exhibition, Loriel Beltrán employs the language of abstraction to grapple with the complexity of human history, the vastness (and incomprehension) of the natural world, and indescribable physical experience of light and color. What captivates him, especially, is the profound connection between color––a manifestation of light––and its ties to substances originating from the sun, extracted from minerals, and developed into pigments. 

Together the works in To Name the Light offer an excavation, a dissection, a dispersion and deciphering of time and history––personal, shared, and that of painting. Previously, Loriel Beltrán described the interplay between chosen combinations of colors as “panels of code;” rather than representing an image, they comprise a distinct visual language, replete with numerous possibilities for imagery. Loriel Beltrán transforms the code into a rich repository of accumulated knowledge, experience, memory, and signification. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London

www.lehmannmaupin.com