Matthew Wong’s rhapsodies in blue claim their place in art history
Dreamscape paintings by an artist whose life was cut tragically short will be on dazzling display at Venice’s Palazzo Tiepolo Passi by Jackie Wullschläger
Untitled, 2018, gouache on paper, 10.75 x 10.75 inches
© Matthew Wong Foundation/ARS New York, photo by Alex Yudzon
Matthew Wong was prodigiously gifted, intuitive, indefatigable and possessed a visionary imagination, a yearning strangeness and high emotional tenor between exaltation and terror. Beginning in 2013 and teaching himself, he galloped through the giants of modernism, assimilating Van Gogh, Seurat, Matisse, plus Chinese calligraphic ink landscapes, to create distinctive, stylised, iridescently patterned compositions: radiant chromatic harmonies, teeming surfaces of short loaded brushstrokes, meticulous dots and dabs, contrasted with long lush smooth marks.
By happy chance, Wong’s solo show arrives in Venice alongside those of two other painters, British-Kenyan Michael Armitage and Ghana-raised, Vienna-based Amoako Boafo, both born like Wong in 1984, who have similarly mined modernism — Armitage via Gauguin, Boafo via Klimt and Schiele — to scintillating effect, all three non-western artists refreshing the western tradition. With Interiors, Wong, forever young in his paintings, is set to grow gracefully into a place in global art history.