KVT – Disolving into Dreams

Dissolving into Dreams

…..with apologies to the artist if my interpretation of dreams doesn’t gel with his intent. There’s this great exhibition that you should get along to especially if you’re on a downer, or even slightly depressed and if you’re on a high you’ll feel like dancing as soon as you enter the gallery. ‘Journey of Dreams’ by Dang Anh Tuan is a colorful and sensuous series of paintings produced over the past four years. Oil paint has been applied in thick impasto and the colors will electrify you. Even the pastel and earth toned pieces have a frisson about them.

It’s one of those exhibitions around which I’d like to set an assignment for an intelligent group of Art Appreciation/Art History students. They’d tease out all the threads they could associate with:
* Gaughin and his escape to paradise
* Edvard Munch and his painting ‘The Scream’ and one of its modern readings as a figurative interpretation of Depersonalisation Disorder* (which may sound extreme but is the third most common psychological adult experience after feelings of anxiety and depression).
* Matisse and his famous ‘La Danse’ and the cut outs he executed in the nineteen forties.

The lush sensuality in the paintings shifts backwards and forwards from an innocent discovery of self in an innocent Eden to disembodied, androgynous uncertainty- even sorrow and remorse- to playful sexuality, to unbridled passion, to hedonistic fulfillment and into a joyful, sensuously erotic dance in a 2010 canvas with its joyfully acid bright colors.

The central piece in the exhibition ‘Journey of Dreams’ 2010, a large triptych, seems to gather all the elements of the dreaming canvasses that sensuously evolved from a previous series and began in 2005 and rounds off the journey as ambiguously as it began.

It’s a luscious exhibition and one that I thoroughly recommend.

Others, far more expert than me, will have a different reading of the large and often lascivious canvasses and the catalogue entry by art historian and critic Dr Annette van den Bosch is excellent.

The exhibition finishes on the 13th and is at the Viet Arts Centre in Yiet Kieu.

*Depersonalization is a state in which the individual ceases to perceive the reality of the self or the environment. The person feels that his or her body is unreal, is changing, or is dissolving; or that he or she is outside of the body. The person is going through the motions of life but not experiencing it, feeling as though in a movie, feeling as if in a dream, feeling a disconnection from their body.