Opening reception is on Sat 2/27/2016 from 6pm - 9pm. Exhibition runs until 3/20/16.
Monte Vista Pojects is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles artist Tran Truong. Truong's recent paintings depict spatial relationships between everyday objects and urban situations, rigorously abstracted into a hyperflat two-dimensional space. Telescoping groups of red, yellow, and green circles on a black background evoke a barren city street at night. A vertical band of color terminating in a large triangle carries the winkingly literal title “Umbrella”. In another work, a vertical stripe on the canvas's surface looks like nothing so much as an orthographic projection of a road making its way up a steep hill. Much color field painting (as epitomized, for example, by the work of Ellsworth Kelly) has traditionally drawn its vocabulary of shape from nature, while obscuring that very act of sourcing through radical formal simplification. In contrast, Truong's motif's identities are almost comically explicit, placing her canvases in a curious zone of overlap between illusionism and literalism. Their heraldic simplicity owes an uncertain debt to their originating inspirations, which they overwrite without precisely representing. These paintings adapt the historical language of “autonomous” art, but make no claim to autonomy. Deprived of the contextual markers that traditionally anchor pictorial depiction, Truong's spare geometries float adrift in the viewer's mind, tossed by waves of association, only distantly moored to their literal subjects.
Truong's work has been shown in group exhibitions throughout Los Angeles and the bay area. She is currently a 2016 MFA candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. This will be her first solo exhibition.