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Lot Essay
Matthew Wong’s Arcadia (2017) conjures a vibrant, dreamlike landscape in a sparkling patchwork of colour. Rendered on a jewel-like scale, its saturated palette and intricate, offbeat composition exemplify the work of the artist Roberta Smith called ‘one of the most talented painters of his generation’ (R. Smith, ‘A Final Rhapsody in Blue From Matthew Wong’, New York Times, 24 December 2019). Wong, who lived and worked between Canada and Hong Kong, was self-taught, and used his art to conjure contemplative, richly enigmatic spaces. Here, a small nude figure stands amid a wildflower meadow of vivid hues. Van Gogh-esque dabs of purple, yellow, green, orange and blue blossom before a ground of warm yellow ochre, filling the picture like an impasto mosaic. A slender, red-leaved tree bends towards the figure, who leans forward attentively: the two appear to be engaged in conversation.
‘Art is all-encompassing in my daily life’, Wong said in 2014, when he had been painting seriously for just two years. ‘When I’m not working, I’m at the library doing research into the history of art, figuring out where I can fit into the greater dialogue between artists throughout time, or on the internet looking at art-related websites and engaging in dialogue on social media with artists and art-world figures around the world’ (M. Wong, quoted in ‘They are Artists: Matthew Wong’, Altermodernists, 29 October 2014). Via this deep visual learning—intense Fauvist colours, spangled Pointillism, Hockney’s soaring post-cubist landscapes and the bold patterns of Matisse, Klimt and Kusama alike echo in his work—Wong developed his own singular, deceptively straightforward style. ‘These paintings’, Smith writes, ‘are extremely open and vulnerable. But once they lure you in, they leave you alone to explore their chromatic, spatial and psychological complexities’ (R. Smith, ibid.).
Wong worked intuitively and without preparatory drawing, passing the brush between both hands as he brought his imagined scenery to the surface. As with many of his paintings, Arcadia is animated by vertiginous warps in distance and tone. Its zones of colour flex uncannily between positive and negative space, scintillating pattern and pictorial description, plunging us into a brilliant and disorienting realm. The lone figures that people Wong’s pictures have been compared to the tiny wanderers in Song Dynasty Chinese landscapes, whose paths viewers can follow into the picture to explore the vastness of creation. This absorbing experience of landscape might equally be seen to express Wong’s sense of journeying into art history, new painterly horizons unfolding around him as he studies his craft. The wistful, visionary quality of the present work speaks to an image of art as revelation: like a garden of Eden, it seems an environment alive with meaning and mystery, inviting us into a potential world beyond our own.
‘Art is all-encompassing in my daily life’, Wong said in 2014, when he had been painting seriously for just two years. ‘When I’m not working, I’m at the library doing research into the history of art, figuring out where I can fit into the greater dialogue between artists throughout time, or on the internet looking at art-related websites and engaging in dialogue on social media with artists and art-world figures around the world’ (M. Wong, quoted in ‘They are Artists: Matthew Wong’, Altermodernists, 29 October 2014). Via this deep visual learning—intense Fauvist colours, spangled Pointillism, Hockney’s soaring post-cubist landscapes and the bold patterns of Matisse, Klimt and Kusama alike echo in his work—Wong developed his own singular, deceptively straightforward style. ‘These paintings’, Smith writes, ‘are extremely open and vulnerable. But once they lure you in, they leave you alone to explore their chromatic, spatial and psychological complexities’ (R. Smith, ibid.).
Wong worked intuitively and without preparatory drawing, passing the brush between both hands as he brought his imagined scenery to the surface. As with many of his paintings, Arcadia is animated by vertiginous warps in distance and tone. Its zones of colour flex uncannily between positive and negative space, scintillating pattern and pictorial description, plunging us into a brilliant and disorienting realm. The lone figures that people Wong’s pictures have been compared to the tiny wanderers in Song Dynasty Chinese landscapes, whose paths viewers can follow into the picture to explore the vastness of creation. This absorbing experience of landscape might equally be seen to express Wong’s sense of journeying into art history, new painterly horizons unfolding around him as he studies his craft. The wistful, visionary quality of the present work speaks to an image of art as revelation: like a garden of Eden, it seems an environment alive with meaning and mystery, inviting us into a potential world beyond our own.