"The Crossing" is an aesthetic and cathartic epic in which the French-Vietnamese artist Bảo Vương is inviting us to board.
As soon as our eyes brush the masses of paint sculpted by the artist, emotion arises, before submerging us, along side the reflections that follow our moves in the exhibition; we become one with this thick, tumultuous material, in turn abrupt, generous, harsh, subtle and, against all expectations, luminous. In front of theimmensity of the horizon where the sea and the sky merge, beauty is revealed, contemplation fills us, humility imposes itself.
The night in « The Crossing »’s paintings takes us back to our existential wanderings, tothe trials we have been through, to the fears of annihilation, to the dark moments wemust overcome. If the starting point is the artist’s intimate history, the work of lightbrings us back to our power to overcome and our capacity for resilience.
The artist’s "crossing" becomes ours, individual, but also collective. This joint past, like a shared ocean, carries us with hope towards the horizon, making us oscillate between light and shadow.
As we wander through "Coming through", our personal experiences become intensely meaningful in the artist’s meditative reverie.
Duality - present in everything and everyone of us, in our joys and wounds, in our failures and successes, in life and death - is exposed in the alternating dark and lightmaterials used in each of Bảo Vương’s monochromes.
Braque said: "Art is a wound that becomes light". With "The Crossing", Bảo Vương demonstrates this statement with accuracy and enchantment.
In the late 1970s, one-year-old Bảo Vương was carried by his mother to flee Vietnam, which was still in thestage of war. On a make shift boat, Bảo and 200 others spent 11 months at sea and in refugee camps, like thousands of other exiles, who later became known as « boat people ».
The night in « The Crossing »’s paintings takes us back to our existential wanderings, tothe trials we have been through, to the fears of annihilation, to the dark moments wemust overcome. If the starting point is the artist’s intimate history, the work of lightbrings us back to our power to overcome and our capacity for resilience.
The artist’s "crossing" becomes ours, individual, but also collective. This joint past, like a shared ocean, carries us with hope towards the horizon, making us oscillate between light and shadow.
As we wander through "Coming through", our personal experiences become intensely meaningful in the artist’s meditative reverie.
Duality - present in everything and everyone of us, in our joys and wounds, in our failures and successes, in life and death - is exposed in the alternating dark and lightmaterials used in each of Bảo Vương’s monochromes.
Braque said: "Art is a wound that becomes light". With "The Crossing", Bảo Vương demonstrates this statement with accuracy and enchantment.
In the late 1970s, one-year-old Bảo Vương was carried by his mother to flee Vietnam, which was still in thestage of war. On a make shift boat, Bảo and 200 others spent 11 months at sea and in refugee camps, like thousands of other exiles, who later became known as « boat people ».
Many years later, after having been trained at the Beaux-Arts of Toulon in France, Bảo returned to his nativecountry. He then starts referring to the nights of this flight at sea, by painting completely black artworks with aknife, between abstraction and figuration, between painting and sculpture, between sky and sea.
