“Wong makes myriad lines, dots, daubs, and short, lush brushstrokes, eventually arriving at an imaginary landscape that tilts away from the picture plane at an odd angle. A painterly cartographer, Wong literally feels his way across the landscape, dot by dot, paint stroke by paint stroke.”
Dazzling, emotionally compelling, and executed in an exquisitely rendered melancholy veil of blue, Moonlight Mile from 2017 epitomises the stark beauty and self-exploration that distinguishes Matthew Wong’s remarkable oeuvre. A mesmerising harmony of stylistic grace, tonal vibrancy, and raw sent.mes nt, Wong weaves a rhapsody of cobalts and azures into a tranquil, star-studded topography, motionless save one figure trekking his dreamscape. Reflective of the innate poignancy of his works, Moonlight Mile is an articulation of Wong’s emotions, and typifies the immediate and intimate resonance of his paintings. As the artist explained in 2018: “I would like my paintings to have something in them people across the spectrum can find things they identify with. I do believe that there is inherent loneliness or melancholy to much of contemporary life”. (the artist quoted in: Maria Vogel, “Matthew Wong Reflects on the Melancholy of Life”, Art of Choice, November 2018, (online)). It is this remarkable emotive quality that distinguishes Wong’s practice within the vaunted bastion of landscape painting. Herein, Moonlight Mile - exemplifying Wong’s Blue Paintings, which the artist worked on from 2017 until his unt.mes ly passing in 2019 at the age of thirty five - is a particularly poignant example of the artist's emotive aesthetic talent.
“I would like my paintings to have something in them people across the spectrum can find things they identify with. I do believe that there is inherent loneliness or melancholy to much of contemporary life.”
Working directly from tubes of paint, Wong would allow creative impulses to carry his hand, drawing arabesques in varying strokes and daubs which elicit myriad sensations of presence and movement across the canvas. The bespeckled skyline is disrupted by striking mountains rendered in impastoes of blue, purple, metallic silver, and black. Situated within this central point is his omnipresent lone traveller, cipher or a stand-in for the viewer in this ineffably poignant and engulfing landscape. A pictorial device developed by Caspar David Friedrich in his canonically poignant Romantic landscapes, this lone figure seen from the back (coined the rĂĽckenfigur) offers a vehicle to convey an intimation of our insignificance and vulnerability when confronted with sublime, awesome expanse and power of nature. Redolent of the visual lyricism of Vincent van Gogh, the sensuousness of Gustave Klimt, the emotively potent Pablo Picasso, and the Romantic tradition of Friedrich, Midnight Mile synthesises endless references and articulates an enchantingly vulnerable, immersive, and acutely alluring image rich in chromatic, spatial, and psychological complexities.
This painting offers an extraordinary consolidation and extension of a long tradition of landscape painting by crafting a menagerie of dreamscapes of unfathomable breadth and anchoring them all to the bittersweet pas seul of existence. Moonlight Mile is a tender, enchanting composition that.mes ditates on the liminal space between the fantastical and the real. Following his tragic death shortly before his second show Blue at Karma Gallery in New York, art critic Eric Sutphin wrote a review of the exhibition for Art in America, referring to a group of late nineteenth-century French artists:
“Wong can be considered a kind of nouveau Nabi, a descendant of Post-Impressionist painters like Édouard Vuillard and Paul Sérusier. Like his forebears, he synthesises stylised representations, bright colours and mystical themes to create rich, evocative scenes. His works, despite their ebullient palette, are frequently tinged with a melancholic yearning.”
Since his death, Wong’s legacy has only continued to grow, with his works entering the permanent collects ions of vaunted public institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. That a selection of works were recently exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum in Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort (March - September 2024), is indicative of his revered standing within the grand canon of oil painting.