A warm orange and pink glow emanates from the background, indicating that the two have completed their journey and will exit hell into a new dawn-or perhaps Virgil and Dante have completed their space expedition and are approaching the heat and light of the sun.Īcross the thirteen paintings, Nguyen disperses a variety of spaceship imagery, most notably what appear as cross sections or floor plans for rocket ships. Similarly, in My Guide and I (2023), Virgil and Dante appear side by side against another mass of greenery and snake creatures. As Virgil descends into Hell, he makes celestial contact. According to Nguyen, this circle represents the moon-again, directionality is inverted. The outline of a circle anchors the composition in the lower left corner, the interior of this circle distinctly sparse compared to its dense surroundings. The surface of the canvas is covered in tiny and reflective metal leaf stamps shaped like missiles and rockets from afar, the canvas appears to be covered in stars or raindrops. In Nguyen’s Leading the Way (2023), Virgil’s form consumes the picture plane and seems to emerge from a pattern of apparent foliage, which upon close inspection, reveals itself as a web of serpentine creatures with human heads and scorpion tails (monsters from the Inferno story). In the Inferno, the character Virgil is tasked with leading Dante (who seeks moral enlightenment) on a spiritual journey through the nine rings of hell. As the artist says, in her rendition of Inferno, “up is down, and down is up.” Drawing spatial and literary parallels between two historical narratives that shaped the contemporary Western worldview, Nguyen paints the ascent into space as equivalent to the descent into hell-a reversal that extends her lines of questioning into an array of larger concerns, including colonialism, religion, violence, and environmentalism. She renders both fictional and historical characters from each story in an overlapping fashion, charting their journeys across a sea of interconnected icons, partially obscured text, abstract patterns, and figurative imagery. Across the exhibition, Nguyen draws a parallel between two distinct narratives, separated by centuries but united in their mania to map the furthest reaches of the celestial universe: Virgil and Dante’s religious pilgrimage through the nine rings of hell and the secular Race for Space that defined Cold War-Era politics. She envisions these sociocultural gray areas as potential thresholds leading to paradigm shifts, and she often models characters who might usher in these moments of transformation. In Inferno, Nguyen carefully considers the ways that language and narrative construct areas of moral ambiguity or ethical confusion. She probes this tension between form and content by confusing the visual plane, which she achieves through intricate visual metaphor nestled in dense layers of diverse material. In particular, the elegant imagery and harmonious aesthetic of Nguyen’s paintings often belies the turbulent nature of the narratives at hand. Across her media-Nguyen also produces artist books under her publishing platform Passenger Pigeon Press-the artist aims to unsettle. Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories, often taking a narrative approach. This fall, Nguyen will present a new body of work in her first solo museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio will open in our London gallery in 2024, and the series will culminate in 2025 with A Comedy for Mortals: Paradisio, Nguyen’s New York debut. The exhibition is the first in a three-part series based on the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s canonical masterpiece of Christian literature.
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