The New York t.mes s, "Matthew Wong, Painter on Cusp of Fame, Dies at 35"

Hypnotic and hypnagogic, Matthew Wong’s The Realm of Appearances presents a vista of detached nostalgia and untethered memory. The focal point of the artist’s breakthrough exhibition at Karma in 2018, and the featured image for both The New York t.mes s’ review of that show and in its obituary for the artist following his tragic death just a year later, the present work stands as one of Wong’s greatest paintings. Combining the dreamlike qualities of Peter Doig’s landscapes with Gustav Klimt’s jewel-like paintings of nature and the churning immediacy of Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields, Wong creates an entirely unique artistic vernacular that relies on his idiosyncratic handling of paint. As Will Heinrich described in his review of the 2018 show: “’The Realm of Appearances’ in which a red meadow rides up to a high horizon line and impasto moon, is a densely set typology of brush strokes: Thick navy wiggles collide with a rain of overlapping oil-green drops and a school of pert yellow dabs.” (Will Heinrich, “What to See in New York Art Galleries this Week: Matthew Wong,” The New York t.mes s, 11 April 2018 (online))

However, it is not only Wong’s virtuosic handling of paint but his instinctive understanding of composition that evidences his unique contribution to Contemporary Art. The crux of this compositional awareness is found in the small figures that pepper the larger canvasses. Vertiginous compositions are anchored by these figures, and as Will Heinrich observed of the present work: “It’s only the little gray man at a wishing well who turns ‘The Realm of Appearances’ from an exotic but contained garden into the endless expanse of the unconscious.” (Ibid.) Like the supine depiction of Jackson Pollock in Peter Doig’s Dayt.mes Astronomy (Private collects ion, Europe), or the shouting policeman in Echo Lake (Tate collects ion, United Kingdom), the presence of a human figure enables the viewer to experience the picture directly, grounding the fantastical landscape in something universally relatable. As Eric Sutphin observed in his review of the 2018 show, “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 synthesizes stylized representations, bright colors, and mystical themes to create rich, evocative scenes. His works, despite their ebullient palette, are frequently tinged with a melancholic yearning.” (Eric Sutphin, “Matthew Wong,” Art in America, 1 June 2018 (online)) A remarkable painting that epitomizes the very best of Matthew Wong’s practice, The Realm of Appearances is a meditation on the liminal spaces between the fantastical and the real, and an extraordinary consolidation and extension of a long tradition of landscape painting