Warped Promises: Gentle disturbances in Phạm Huy Thông’s surrealist painting

       “As soon as one promises not to do something,

it becomes the one thing above all other that one most wishes to do.”

-Georgette Heyer-

A witness of one too many ironies in life, Phạm Huy Thông has always been aware of how the language of art can subtly “project” and “interpret” reality. This understanding becomes his guide on the journey into surrealism. From early 2010, the artist has displayed a level of dexterity in constructing a world out of mundane symbols, perched on the border between real and unreal; that world, while imbued with fierce intensity, still holds space for subterranean sarcasm. And with this new series, titled Sorry for the Inconvenience, Thông has leveraged his surrealist brushstrokes to another mindset, gearing toward expressing his inner perspective about society through his artistic language.

Symbolism is one of the foundational elements of surrealism. Drawing from natural of societal materials, surrealist painters twist, bend, and mold images from daily life into “icons” so as to express their internal world. This “transformation” triggers a subsequent shift in meaning of these icons. In this series, we see icons of pop culture, such as Mona Lisa, Buddha, Darth Vader, or the tiger zodiac greeting spring. Such familiar symbols create a false sense of safety: they promise a feasibility to understand, to feel, and to accept – familiarity always tricks us into carelessness.

And true to form, Thông, the magician, has covered these seemingly obvious symbols with a film of tarpaulin, also a readily-seen image at any construction site. Using an impasto technique to raise the painting’s surface, thus shaping the form of “the main character”, Thông covers his icons with tightly-wrapped tarpaulin, creating curves and waves that both conceal and allude to the shape of the icons beneath. Now, our eyes begin registering some oddities: the icons suddenly become ambivalent, half exposed half covered; it is almost as if they were made out of the tarpaulin itself. Our sense of familiarity is shaken; the “transformation” has generated a “translation” in meaning. We ask ourselves: are these icons still what we think they are? If not, then what can be behind that layer of tarpaulin?

The spirit of surrealism in Thông’s series is embedded in the concept of the promise. The symbols adopted by him are promises for something familiar, comfortable. The promise (a metaphor for a future) is the core of the painting, like the pit of a surrealist fruit. Wrapped around that pit is the kernel and the “peel” made from the tricolor tarpaulin, creating a “translating” film that is visible yet obscure. Nothing is of certainty or transparency here: all icons are going through (re)construction, the future (re)figured, the promise not entirely assured; one can think of the metaphor of a caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis behind the translucent chrysalis – we can only catch a glimpse of this inconspicuous “translation”. An ongoing construction site, wrapped in tarpaulin, is a promise for a new structure. Even the title Sorry for the Inconvenience itself is a silent promise, yet whether it is feasible or not is hard to determine. The future, in the end, is still the present in continuity.

Somebody once shared with me that they do not understand, even fear, surrealist painting. And to be fair, their sense of uneasiness is not entirely illogical. Our brain is coded to “read” symbols and associate a concrete system of meaning to them; when such symbols become “wrapped” or “deviant”, we immediately question their validity. The question Why here is necessary to step into the realm of surrealism, yet one needs to do more to actually see the message from the artist. Only by rising above our desire for comfort, seeing these symbols in their new form and existence, and exploring the endless possibilities of interpreting them, can we gradually begin to grasp the context of the work, and deduct from there the message. This process of “re-translation” will widen our perspective, allowing us to see familiar symbols with new eyes.

Standing in front of Thông’s painting, I ask myself, what makes the surrealist essence in his art. Concept? Color palette? Composition? Line? Symbols/ And after absorbing all the tarpaulin-wrapped icons, perpetually enmeshed and indivisible, I realize that his surrealist essence is comprised of all of the above, peppered with his comedic playfulness, his desire to subvert what is comfortable, reversing and granting them the power to disturb or interrupt. His subtle ego permeated the canvas, lurking behind the tarpaulin in a game of hide-and-seek with the viewers, rendering them antsy: that perturbed feeling is the other side of the same coin with tranquility – sometimes, they even merge into one another.

Perhaps, we sometimes need to feel unsettled, to see that there are other ways of seeing life.

If things always remain the way they are, when can we be anew?

Dương Mạnh Hùng

Saigon, September 2022

About the author:

Dương Mạnh Hùng is an independent translator/curator. Their practice weaves textual intricacy with visual subtlety to deliver responses and raise questions about the state of the world. Hung’s greatest interest lies in the transparent yet opaque dynamics between visual arts (visuality) and translation (textuality), which traces its root back to their close attention to global and Southeast Asian movements in art and socio-political histories, particularly through a botanical/ecological lens.