Les Infinis Invisibles: Trúc-Anh

Painter, draftsman, performer, poet and sculptor Trúc-Anh was born in Paris in 1983. After having lived in Lausanne, Brussels, Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles, he now lives and works in Marseille. For his fifth solo presentation at Galerie Sator, and his first intervention in the Komunuma gallery space in Romainville, Trúc-Anh has dedicated himself to painting and presents new works, including three large format paintings.

The relationship between the visible and the invisible lies at the heart of his practice. Trúc-Anh considers painting as a medium that allows him to give form to invisible worlds. By this term he means anything related to spirituality and the world of spirits, from ancestor worship at the origin of his Ink Kingdom series to the shamanic practice invoked in his exhibition “Le Céleste du Terrestre” [The Celestial of the Earthly].

For this exhibition, Trúc-Anh draws on his Sino-Vietnamese roots for certain subjects such as the Buddha or the monk Thích Quảng Đức, as well as the dialogue between emptiness and fullness, borrowed from Daoist philosophy. Before the large format paintings, the spectator is immersed in the work feeling the energetic presence of the entities represented in the same relationship of scale. The spectator approaches the work with their entire body and being.

At first sight, the understanding and interpreting of the work may be difficult. The spectator seeks to understand what they see. The emptiness and the fullness, as well as the lines and flatness are constructed as opposite forces. The metallic paintings with their luminous reflections are saturated with visual information. Conversely, the black precedes any form of idea. It is what we see when we close our eyes, inside ourselves. But this deep and limbic black, absence of visual information, produces a form of immateriality.

These games of visual language developed by Trúc-Anh attempt to throw off the viewer. Moved by visions, they try to translate them on the canvas, to experience them through painting. The works are then gradually revealed to the spectator. His paintings are not representations, they are incarnations. Their enigma invites the viewer to the sensory experience of contemplation, interpretation and even introspection. Through painting, Trúc-Anh captures the precise moment when the figure appears and disappears simultaneously, thus seeking to reach a world of pure

sensitivity, not perceptible to the naked eye— a form of spiritual transcendence.