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Lot Essay
Referencing Quentin Tarantino’s iconic films from the turn of the millennium, Kill Bill: Volume 3 shares the name of the rumored and anxiously awaited third film in the series. The present work is therefore quixotic, as it waits for a sequel that has been promised for 20 years but has never come. Instead, Nguyen creates his own sequel, a fan fiction with its own beautifully inscrutable story. Here, he paints on aluminum, a technique often utilized by photorealist painters, and which exemplifies the uncanniness of the scene. Like a video game or a fever dream, Kill Bill: Volume 3 presents us with humanoid figures who seem ready to act on our behest like avatars, though we cannot know the nature of the journey we will undertake. At once a painting and a stage-play, Kill Bill: Volume 3 speaks to Nguyen’s eye for the filmic. As he notes, perhaps in a Tarantino-esque gesture, “Desire and reverence are very closely linked in my mind. There’s also fear and desire. The tension between fear and awe and the sublime—that something that is beautiful can be both frightening and attracting—links to a certain idea of ancient experience” (J. Nguyen, quoted in G. Samms, “Julien Nguyen,” TheGuide.art, June 26, 2021, https://theguide.art/exclusive/julien-nguyen-matthew-marks-gallery/). The young artist already has a grasp on the complex emotions of painting.
A painting both contemporary and evocative of another time, Kill Bill: Volume 3 is theatrical and enigmatic. It models the spot-lit darkness often found in Caravaggio, a painterly strategy that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists used to heighten the drama of Biblical and mythical scenes. A useful comparison is Caravaggio’s trance-like Narcissus (1597-1599, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome). Nguyen’s strange action figures, two quasi-human and the other a demon, also resemble the cast of self-referential characters in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid)). We can identify them with more surety as the nightmarish characters of an arcane poem by the famed French writer Charles Baudelaire. He writes, “Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less extraordinary ascended the mysterious stairway by which Hell gains access to the frailty of sleeping man, and communes with him in secret. These three postured gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a stage” (C. Baudelaire, “The Temptations; or, Eros, Plutus, and Glory,” in A. Symons, trans., Baudelaire: Prose and Poetry, New York, 1926, p. 33). Baudelaire’s two Satans and a She-Devil come to him in a dream, just as the spirits in Kill Bill: Volume 3 seem to emerge from the darkness. Nguyen and Baudelaire insist that the stairway to Hell must be kept open.
Nguyen is already making a name for himself in art and fashion. He has frequently worked with the avant-garde fashion label Ottolinger, collaborating on garments worn by Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid, Barbie Ferreira, and SZA. Vogue wrote of Nguyen’s celebrated designs, “Nguyen’s weird and wonderful aesthetic world—where a saint sweeps into exaggerated contrapposto and sprouts talon-like claws, or a youthful figure turns to the viewer with eyes glowing red like a futuristic cyborg—have made for some of their most cult-followed pieces yet” (L. Hess, “Meet Julien Nguyen, the Renaissance-Inspired Painter Behind This Season’s Buzziest Print,” Vogue, September 29, 2020, https://www.vogue.com/article/julien-nguyen-ottolinger-artist-collaboration). Nguyen’s foray into fashion is yet another example of his unique approach to painting as something both historic and contemporary, relevant to fashion, gaming, and literature. Of Renaissance paintings he muses, “They’re constructed like stages, like dioramas, or like maps in a video game” (J. Nguyen, quoted in T. Diehl, “Julien Nguyen on the Renaissance, conjury, and painting himself,” Artforum, July 20, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/julien-nguyen-on-the-renaissance-conjury-and-painting-himself-86206). The art world has also taken notice. The same year he completed this painting, he was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Nguyen has also mounted one-person exhibitions at Kunstverein München, Munich (2014), the Swiss Institute, New York (2018), and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2019).
“[Nguyen] achieves what few artists manage: the acceptance that nothing is new and nothing lasts, that we inhabit a world built beautifully from the rubble of other worlds, and that it is here we make our stand.” - Travis Diehl
Perhaps the most interesting element of Kill Bill: Volume 3, and Nguyen’s work generally, is that it is both familiar and strange. The present work embodies the tradition of Surrealism from Man Ray and René Magritte to Laurie Simmons and James Casebere. As critic Travis Diehl argues, “[Nguyen] achieves what few artists manage: the acceptance that nothing is new and nothing lasts, that we inhabit a world built beautifully from the rubble of other worlds, and that it is here we make our stand” (T. Diehl, “Julien Nguyen on the Renaissance, conjury, and painting himself,” Artforum, July 20, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/julien-nguyen-on-the-renaissance-conjury-and-painting-himself-86206). Kill Bill: Volume 3 evokes the uncanny feeling of walking down a street and feeling certain that you have been there before. Heaven, Hell, a nightmare, or something else altogether—Nguyen imagines it all and translates these worlds into paint.
A painting both contemporary and evocative of another time, Kill Bill: Volume 3 is theatrical and enigmatic. It models the spot-lit darkness often found in Caravaggio, a painterly strategy that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists used to heighten the drama of Biblical and mythical scenes. A useful comparison is Caravaggio’s trance-like Narcissus (1597-1599, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome). Nguyen’s strange action figures, two quasi-human and the other a demon, also resemble the cast of self-referential characters in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid)). We can identify them with more surety as the nightmarish characters of an arcane poem by the famed French writer Charles Baudelaire. He writes, “Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less extraordinary ascended the mysterious stairway by which Hell gains access to the frailty of sleeping man, and communes with him in secret. These three postured gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a stage” (C. Baudelaire, “The Temptations; or, Eros, Plutus, and Glory,” in A. Symons, trans., Baudelaire: Prose and Poetry, New York, 1926, p. 33). Baudelaire’s two Satans and a She-Devil come to him in a dream, just as the spirits in Kill Bill: Volume 3 seem to emerge from the darkness. Nguyen and Baudelaire insist that the stairway to Hell must be kept open.
Nguyen is already making a name for himself in art and fashion. He has frequently worked with the avant-garde fashion label Ottolinger, collaborating on garments worn by Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid, Barbie Ferreira, and SZA. Vogue wrote of Nguyen’s celebrated designs, “Nguyen’s weird and wonderful aesthetic world—where a saint sweeps into exaggerated contrapposto and sprouts talon-like claws, or a youthful figure turns to the viewer with eyes glowing red like a futuristic cyborg—have made for some of their most cult-followed pieces yet” (L. Hess, “Meet Julien Nguyen, the Renaissance-Inspired Painter Behind This Season’s Buzziest Print,” Vogue, September 29, 2020, https://www.vogue.com/article/julien-nguyen-ottolinger-artist-collaboration). Nguyen’s foray into fashion is yet another example of his unique approach to painting as something both historic and contemporary, relevant to fashion, gaming, and literature. Of Renaissance paintings he muses, “They’re constructed like stages, like dioramas, or like maps in a video game” (J. Nguyen, quoted in T. Diehl, “Julien Nguyen on the Renaissance, conjury, and painting himself,” Artforum, July 20, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/julien-nguyen-on-the-renaissance-conjury-and-painting-himself-86206). The art world has also taken notice. The same year he completed this painting, he was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Nguyen has also mounted one-person exhibitions at Kunstverein München, Munich (2014), the Swiss Institute, New York (2018), and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2019).
“[Nguyen] achieves what few artists manage: the acceptance that nothing is new and nothing lasts, that we inhabit a world built beautifully from the rubble of other worlds, and that it is here we make our stand.” - Travis Diehl
Perhaps the most interesting element of Kill Bill: Volume 3, and Nguyen’s work generally, is that it is both familiar and strange. The present work embodies the tradition of Surrealism from Man Ray and René Magritte to Laurie Simmons and James Casebere. As critic Travis Diehl argues, “[Nguyen] achieves what few artists manage: the acceptance that nothing is new and nothing lasts, that we inhabit a world built beautifully from the rubble of other worlds, and that it is here we make our stand” (T. Diehl, “Julien Nguyen on the Renaissance, conjury, and painting himself,” Artforum, July 20, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/julien-nguyen-on-the-renaissance-conjury-and-painting-himself-86206). Kill Bill: Volume 3 evokes the uncanny feeling of walking down a street and feeling certain that you have been there before. Heaven, Hell, a nightmare, or something else altogether—Nguyen imagines it all and translates these worlds into paint.