In the contemporary art scene, the name Tran Le Nam is no stranger to the Hanoi art world. Beginning to appear in group exhibitions in the early 2000s, he gradually asserted his own style, which is strong, fierce, intense and has deep thoughts.
Once a "street" with a strong personality, a brave soldier in the southwestern border battlefield, Tran Le Nam brings to his paintings the perspective of someone who has gone through ups and downs. For him, painting is both beauty and a journey to delve into the self, into the invisible structures of life.
Choosing the exhibition name "Inside Out", he wanted to spread the spirit that true art must present the core essence hidden under the material shell. When painting, the artist needs to truly open up the inner world so that thoughts, emotions, and experiences can be transformed into shape, color, and rhythm of lines.
Before coming to abstract painting, artist Tran Le Nam was passionate about Impressionism and Expressionism, two schools that require the painter to have a delicate perception of light and emotion. But then, in that process, he realized that he needed a freer path, not constrained by the simulation of form.
Self-taught, self-researched, self-practiced, he spent many years "managing" to find his own voice. The turning point came in 2005, when in the group exhibition "Exit", he first exhibited abstract paintings. Since then, the journey of abstraction has become the main stream in his creativity, not to escape reality but to go deep into reality through a different path than the thinking of shapes and structural emotions.
For the past twenty years, he has been quietly painting, researching, experimenting with materials, and persistently creating his style. Now, at the age of over sixty, Tran Le Nam has officially launched his first solo exhibition as a quiet moment to look back on the journey but also as a new starting point for the journeys ahead.
The exhibition "Inside Out" includes two typical creative phases from 2018 to present, reflecting the artist's thinking and practice process. In the period 2018 - 2022, Tran Le Nam used the "removal" operation as a method of creating images. After applying paint to the canvas, he brushed, scraped, peeled, and removed the painted layer, an action that seemed paradoxical but was full of intention. It was this "removal" that revealed the structure, lines, and depth of the visual space.
The paintings of this period often have a loose composition, large panels moving horizontally-vertically-spirally, creating the feeling of looking at the layers of the earth exposed after a flood or a mining operation. Beauty is found in the roughness, in the traces of the process, rather than in perfect form.
If the previous phase was "taking away", the 2022-2025 phase is "building on". Tran Le Nam applied many layers of paint, then peeled them off, then built them up again, creating thick, heavy surfaces, sometimes like reliefs. The stretching and overlapping of the paint layers creates a feeling that is both mechanical and illusory.
The colors also changed dramatically: no longer bright, but "dull", dull, heavy tones, many thin bright layers buried under dark paint. The painting surface became a "force field" of material interactions that helped creative energy accumulate, compress, and then explode into strong visual vibrations.
Although the expression is different, the two periods both aim at the same philosophy: the beauty of simplicity, originality and vitality. For artist Tran Le Nam, art does not lie in elaborate details but in the spirit of generalization, the authenticity of emotions and the "liveliness" of structure.
The artist once shared: "Images from life are very rich. We only need eyes and heart to discover its beauty, then give it a spirit to have a work of art." That saying summarizes his view of painting: not noisy but loyal to the breath of nature and the inner self. When painting, he can do it over and over again on the same painting until reaching "ecstasy".
Tran Le Nam’s paintings are difficult to appreciate in the usual way. There are no specific images, no stories, no characters. But when standing in front of the paintings, the viewer feels the inner movement of color, strokes, blocks and energy.
The "inside out" view here is an aesthetic point of view, and also the way the work exists. Each painting is like a layer of emotional sediment, where the artist uses materials (paint, knife, canvas) to record the inner journey - the journey of thinking looking for a form to express.
If you look closely, you can recognize hidden natural elements, such as wind trails, dirt roads, streams, layers of rocks, patches of clouds... However, these elements are no longer concrete images but have become structures. In that way, Tran Le Nam recreates the natural world with abstract thinking.
The exhibition is arranged in two contrasting sections, with paintings from the “taking away” phase and those from the “overlapping” phase. As one walks through the spaces, one seems to move from light to dark, from light to heavy, from empty to solid. This contrast is not intended to create drama, but to reveal the natural cycle of creation, from simplification to accumulation, from nothingness to fullness.
The exhibition marks a personal milestone and at the same time opens up many thoughts for contemporary Vietnamese art. In a context where art is dominated by the market and the trend of "making it easy to sell", it is rare for an artist in his sixties to persistently follow the path of abstraction.
Painter Tran Le Nam works quietly, studies, explains, and explores on his own. From that perspective, "Going from the inside out" shows that art must be a journey of living with thoughts, emotions, and creative solitude. For him, painting is not just a profession, but a way of existence.
Source: https://nhandan.vn/the-gioi-truu-tuong-trong-trien-lam-di-tu-trong-ra-cua-hoa-si-tran-le-nam-post913337.html
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