Tran Tuan is fully qualified for great successs. Giffed with some profundity in art, he painted realistically for a very long time and created several beautiful portraits of his family and friends. From the fate of each indivifual, he suddenly sought metaphysics in many of his works in the 1990s. As a result, his dreamy chacacter- rathe than rational- has turned his works into some soft or romantic painting, alleviated by a gentle style of oil painting in which colours and light gradually very like in Chinesse ink painting. This oil painting style is getting more and more refined. His painting are drawn slowly, with many layers. The sophisticated harmony of colours is brought about by several intermigled colourful layers. There is no contrast on the surface that shines gently. At times, the outlines of figures and shapes are blurred. This is the turning point in terms of style which allows the painter to shift to figureless abstract painting. This differs greatly in composition with other artists who adopt abstractionism by systematically breaking up figures and shapes (like Nguyen Tu Nghiem for instance). This also diverges from many other abstractionist who paint just to run after the fashion or for the sake of modernity.
However, the road he has chosen is a major one.
Art Critic. PHAN CAM THUONG.
1997
