“Mr. Wong made some of the most irresistible paintings I’ve ever encountered. I fell for the patchworks of color and stippled patterns of his landscapes… It was a visceral experience, like falling for an unforgettable song on first listen.”
Dazzling and emotionally compelling, Night Crossing epitomizes the stark beauty and self-exploration that distinguish Matthew Wong’s remarkable practice. A mesmerizing harmony of stylistic grace, tonal vibrancy, and raw sentiment, Wong weaves a rhapsody of purples and azures into a tranquil, star-studded riverscape, motionless save a single figure, floating in solitude. Reflective of the innate poignancy of his works, Night Crossing is an articulation of Wong’s emotions, and typifies the immediate and intimate resonance of his paintings for his viewers. As the artist explained in 2018: “I would like my paintings to have something in them people across the spectrum can find things they identify with. I do believe that there is inherent loneliness or melancholy to much of contemporary life”. (Maria Vogel, “Matthew Wong Reflects on the Melancholy of Life”, Art of Choice, November 2018 (online)) It is this remarkable emotive quality that distinguishes Wong’s practice within the vaunted bastion of landscape painting, and Night Crossing, as an example of Wong’s Blue Paintings, his final body of work, is a particularly poignant example of his unique aesthetic vernacular.
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Working from raw tubes of paint, Wong allows his painterly impulses to carry his hand, drawing arabesques in varying strokes and daubs, eliciting myriad sensations of presence and movement across the canvas. The bespeckled skyline is lifted by a rippling horizon, pulled across the distant plane in striking impastos of blue and black. The vista of swirls and impressions settles upon an idyllic coastal foreground adorned with the petals of a solitary tree – the focal point of this staggeringly intricate, yet serene landscape. Situated within this central point is his omnipresent lone traveler, a stand-in for the viewer in this ineffably nostalgic landscape.
Like the supine depiction of Jackson Pollock in Peter Doig’s Daytime Astronomy (Private Collection, Europe), or the shouting policeman in Echo Lake (Tate Collection, United Kingdom), the presence of a human figure enables the viewer to experience the picture directly, grounding the fantastical landscape in something universally relatable.
Image © Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia / Art Resource, NY
Right: Peter Doig, White Canoe, 1990-91, Private Collection
Art © 2021 Peter Doig
Describing Wong’s visual vernacular, John Yau observes: “Wong makes myriad lines, dots, daubs, and short, lush brushstrokes, eventually arriving at an imaginary landscape that tilts away from the picture plane at an odd angle. A painterly cartographer, Wong literally feels his way across the landscape, dot by dot, paint stroke by paint stroke.’ (John Yau, “Matthew Wong’s Hallucinatory Pilgrimages'', Hyperallergenic, 22 April 2018 (online) Wong’s resulting artistic language, redolent of the visual lyricism of Vincent Van Gogh, the sensuousness of Gustave Klimt, and the tradition of Chinese ink wash shanshui – synthesizes endless references, articulating an enchantingly vulnerable, immersive, and acutely alluring aesthetic rich in chromatic, spatial and psychological complexities.
Matthew Wong: Market Precedent
A poignant archetype of Wong’s urgent yet sublimely graceful practice, Night Crossing is a work of remarkable significance that displays a multifaceted dynamism that extends from the personal to the universal. Following his tragic death shortly before his second show at Karma gallery, which was comprised entirely of works from this series, Wong’s legacy has only continued to grow, with his works entering the permanent collections of vaunted public institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Crafting a menagerie of dreamscapes of unfathomable breadth and anchoring them all to the bittersweet pas seul of existence, Wong offers something entirely unique with his ephemeral, scintillating oeuvre: tender, enchanting compositions that meditate on the liminal spaces between the fantastical and the real, and constitute an extraordinary consolidation and extension of a long tradition of landscape painting.