Stephen B. Nguyen
Elizabeth Grady
Evoking urban nightscapes and murky interiors, the paintings of Stephen B. Nguyen neither reveal nor conceal their subjects. Instead, the viewer is invited to take on the role of author, constructing his or her own narratives and associations from the scant visual information available to complete the circuit of meaning begun by the artist.
A painting by Nguyen is a seductive thing: at once slick, shiny surface and impenetrable depth–as though the air that occupied the spaces in his urban nightscapes (both exterior and interior) was suffused with a pea-soup fog or laced with precipitation. The works are generally relatively monochrome, with either charcoal gray or a vivid burgundy as the dominant color. Variations in tonality and occasional tiny spots of contrasting color are added to relieve the uniformity. This continuity of color encourages an awareness of the formal issues of composition, as the square or rectangle of their overall shape stands out in stark contrast to the walls on which they are hung. Their geometry is often reinforced by bands of opaque color that seem to cut vertically across the indeterminate imagery, echoing the edges of the canvas. Although this calls to mind Minimalist precedents, these are no mere modernist exercises, standing alone and insisting arrogantly on their independence and "objecthood." Rather, their interpretation is almost entirely contingent upon the environment in which they are shown, and on the subjectivity of the viewer.
Built up of many layers of paint and finished with a high-gloss surface, the paintings reflect their surroundings and the shadowy forms of the gallery occupants, drawing us into a dialogue with the work as we try to make out exactly what the artist has depicted. We literally see ourselves in the pictorial space. Lights glow from what seems like a great distance, and their reflections seem to be recorded, too. But are they street lights, as they appear in Untitled 80, with perhaps a building or an overpass blocking part of our view? Are the reflections seen in a river or on a rain-soaked street? Or are they the winking lights of electronic appliances seen from across the room, whose shimmer might be echoed on a countertop or wood flooring?
The beauty and ambiguity of the surfaces are evidence of the artist’s masterful command of the medium. However, Nguyen is not especially interested in materiality. Instead, it is the rather old-fashioned but nonetheless still widespread cultural habit of reading a painting transparently for content that interests him. "With this particular medium, painting, comes a very specific tradition of making, and conventions of looking that have developed over time. These conventions of looking are what I am most interested in." Using the familiarity of painting’s conventions as an access point for viewers, Stephen B. Nguyen manages to "invert the authority of content," as he puts it–that is, to make it the job of the viewer rather than the artist to construct meaning. The universal resonance of a visual vocabulary derived from common experience–in this case, of the urban environment–enables every viewer to recognize something familiar in the paintings, although each of us might identify that "something" differently. In this way Nguyen draws the viewer into the artist’s working method, asking us to take an active role in selecting images and determining the works’ significance, and in the process to question our own habits of looking at the world.
