Reading and painting in Vietnam

Lé Phô and Mai-Thu are once again the heralds of a session dedicated to the work of Vietnamese artists, one with a profusion of color, the other with controlled restraint.

La Lecture is surprising in its large, square format (144 x 144 cm), which is unusual among Vietnamese artists. But even more striking is the luminosity of the colors chosen by its immediately recognizable creator, the painter Lé Phô. When he painted it – on canvas, an important detail – he had entered a period of full artistic maturity. Although he remained faithful to his favorite themes, women and children, he had renewed his technique, opting for oil for good, and daring to create ambitious compositions, featuring, as in this work, portraits, landscapes and still lifes of flowers and fruit.The subject of reading in a sunny garden, the elegant female figures dressed in the traditional ao dai, the studious young boy, the blue sky, obviously evoke a nostalgia for the country of birth left behind but never forgotten. It’s also the luxuriant bouquet of flowers – so many poppies, tulips, daisies and branches of lily of the valley, brushed with a vivid palette – that holds our attention, a subject within a subject. The work belongs to the period when the artist was under contract to the Wally Findlay gallery in New York. The latter had noticed him during his exhibitions at the Romanet gallery and made no mistake in offering him a collaboration. This American period, which began in 1963 and is now much sought-after, gave him a new energy that shines through on canvas with light and generosity. Mai-Thu also chose the theme of reading in Jeune Femme lisant, but in a very different version, much more interiorized and in a tone that directly evokes his early masters Victor Tardieu and Nguyen Nam Son (1890-1973). The technique – ink and color on silk – is both costly and demands great technical mastery in the application of pigments, but also attests to his particularly strong attachment to his identity, to which he remained faithful throughout his life.