KVT – The Visual Magic that is Nguyen Cam

KVT and a powerful retrospective that launches Art Vietnam

I can’t help it but whenever I am confronted by a well curated display of Nguyen Cam’s visual art I can’t help myself going into appreciative over drive. This opinion piece about the 70 year old Vietnamese/French maestro’s retrospective of work mostly done in the decade from 2004 to the present, has left me little option but to thus enthuse again.

Nguyen Cam’s last exhibition at Art Vietnam was in 2010 and I described the artwork as having a luminance. Cam had had a heart attack in 2007 and it seemed as though he had been charged with a new vitality in post recovery.

His present show that officially opened the new Art Vietnam gallery is also full of luminance, but even more so, it sings-the mixed media songs on canvas of Nguyen Cam. Deep, resonant songs -the genres of which depend on the particular viewer’s musical tastes. For me it is a song cycle that wraps itself around the modern binary minimalism of composer Phillip Glass and the romanticism of Schubert.

There are songs from 2004 that featured his characteristic calligraphic sweeps and the healing ginkgo leaf motif that was to feature in a lot of his work from this time….

……and songs that lift your spirits into 2014 like these two small reds

For me it were the red songs throughout the gallery that formed a uniting, harmonious chorus such as in TET ONCE UPON A TIME and ETERNITY SUN

Red chords strike, ping, soar and twang through the works and if you’re lucky enough to have the galleries to yourself, red enjoins a sensory chorale.

A lot of viewers like to have names and words for their songs and most of Cam’s are titled with the last three in descending order named: TORNADO (perhaps influenced by his sojourn in Texas), GINKGO SUN and WHITE AURORA

After the implied passion and love of life provided by red, the songs, like life, can plunge into the sonorous depths of blue and black……

Verses drift in between providing dramatic contrast…..

…..and suggestions of warmth and earthiness…..

Cam, in his younger years designed stage settings and when I see his dramatic unstretched canvas works I can imagine them re-created as backdrops for a contemporary ballet

His work has also lent itself to textile design in France

……and on the opening night of the exhibition, gallery owner and curator, Suzanne Lecht gave local design team Chula the task of creating a dress for her that echoes Cam’s motifs

In her gallery PR Suzanne opens with the following: Old rice sacks, votive paper offerings, small patches of silver leaf applied lovingly as one might adorn a Buddhist sculpture began to emerge in his work. Fragments of the past and a reverence for the present appeared as adornments marking his reconciliation with his history and with his heart….which indicates that I’m not the only one moved to poetic turn of phrase when encountering Cam’s works…..as seen below from his website.

A lot of artists get to their seventies and show a marked decline in creativity and ability. Some like Nguyen Cam just keep on changing and getting even better.

I look forward to seeing his progress in the next 5 years. An exhibition in 2020 could be amazing.

THE PRESENT ONE AT ART VIETNAM IS THE PERFECT WAY TO BEGIN YOUR 2015 VISUSAL ART ADVENTURE …..it closes on Jan 13