“Mr. Wong made some of the most irresistible paintings I’ve ever encountered… It was a visceral experience, like falling for an unforgettable song on first listen. It was deeply nourishing: my life had been improved and I know other people who have had the same reaction. Such relatively unalloyed pleasure is almost as essential as food.”
ROBERTA SMITH, “A FINAL RHAPSODY IN BLUE FROM MATTHEW WONG,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 27 DECEMBER 2019 (ONLINE)

Vincent van Gogh, Road with Cypress and Star, 1890. Image © Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Dizzying and soothing in equal measure, Matthew Wong’s The Night Watcher reveals the range of the artist’s idiosyncratic visual language of texture and color as he captures the serenity of a turquoise forest nightscape in its full kaleidoscopic brilliance. Like Caspar David Friedrich, Vincent Van Gogh, and others of his Romantic and Impressionist forebears, Wong was deeply moved by the natural world, expressing his contemplative fascination with nature through scintillating visions that combine the stylistic grace of Gustav Klimt’s jewel-like paintings and Peter Doig’s fantastical dreamscapes. Featuring a solitary figure set against the vibrant landscape, a significant motif in Wong’s work that suggests his musings on the loneliness of contemporary life and highlights the splendor of nature, The Night Watcher is a dazzling example of how, as Eric Sutphin describes, “despite their ebullient palette, [Matthew Wong’s paintings] are frequently tinged with a melancholic yearning.” (Eric Sutphin, “Matthew Wong,” Art in America, June 2018 (online))

LEFT: Peter Doig, Blotter, 1993. Image © National Museums Liverpool / Bridgeman Images. Art © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2022. RIGHT: Gustav Klimt, Rosebushes Under the Trees, 1905. Harvard Art Museums. Image © The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

A self-taught artist, Wong studied the styles of painters such as Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard as well as Chinese landscape painting, carefully absorbing them as he clicked through images of art on Instagram or flipped through reference books in local libraries. Wong, an avid daydreamer, painted from raw gestural intuition, elaborating the quick flashes of imagery that his mind recalled often randomly in vague yet lingering glimpses. Wong’s resulting aesthetic is an extraordinary consolidation and extension of traditions of landscape painting, expressing its vivacity by immersing viewers in the artist’s uniquely poignant imagination. Describing Wong’s visual vernacular, art critic 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'," Hyperallergic, 22 April 2018 (online))

Wong's virtuosic handling of paint in The Night Watcher draws the viewer into his prismatic nightscape as dots, wiggles, and strokes coalesce with feeling in a meditatively lustrous symphony. Trees seem to whistle in speckles of radiant yellows and whites, harmonizing with the cool blues of the night. This in turn creates a turquoise rhapsody that is interrupted by nothing other than the alluring auburn glow of the full moon, and the lone pilgrim shrouded in red, wandering below. In scale, the pensive “night watcher” pales in comparison to the surrounding wilderness, emphasizing the grandeur of the fantastical natural landscape. Writing about Wong’s 2018 exhibition at New York’s Karma Gallery, art critic Roberta Smith observes, “[Wong's] paintings are extremely open and vulnerable. But once they lure you in, they leave you alone to explore their chromatic, spatial and psychological complexities. This mysterious journey is often signaled by a smooth pathway leading inward from a painting’s bottom edge — which is sometimes being traveled by a shadowy solitary walker.” (Roberta Smith, “A Final Rhapsody in Blue from Matthew Wong”, 24 December 2019, The New York Times (online))

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810. Image © Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin / Art Resource, NY

The Night Watcher is a hypnotizing example of the genius of Wong’s deeply contemplative mind and masterful painterly hand. Following a lifelong battle with autism and depression, Wong tragically took his life at the age of 35. Since then, Wong’s legacy has been cemented, his works entering the permanent collections of vaunted institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and critical and commercial recognition positioning him as a leading voice of our time – a remarkable feat for a self-taught artist. Celebrated today for his emotionally nourishing landscapes, the artist once earnestly reflected 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 there is inherent loneliness or melancholy to much of contemporary life.” (Maria Vogel, “Matthew Wong Reflects on the Melancholy of Life”, November 2018, Art of Choice, (online)) Capturing the chromatic brilliance of Wong’s imagination and the tender serenity of his spirit, The Night Watcher is reflective of the late artist’s thoughtfully crafted menagerie of dreamscapes, all anchored to the bittersweet pas seul of existence and enchanting those who encounter them to see and think in deeper, more sensitive ways.