Matthew Wong’s Living Rooms

A candle is burning. A fresh flower sits in a vase. A grandfather clock stands in the distance. Such symbols of time passing recur in Matthew Wong’s beguiling paintings of home interiors. Some are somber, ultra minimal, while others are as elaborate and fantastical as the landscapes that made Wong one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. On occasion, a figure is present, or a shadow of one, but quite often the place is empty. A door may be cracked open, allowing in a blade of light, as if someone has just left. We are alone in these rooms.

Although about three dozen of Wong’s interiors are on view in Venice at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi (through November 1)—the first exhibition to zero in on the domestic settings he constantly rendered and returned to—there will doubtless be questions about what they reveal of the artist’s short life, and his suicide in 2019, at the age of 35, in Edmonton, Alberta. These works, “saturated as they are with rich, nonrepresentational color, are chambers of the mind and, ultimately, the soul,” as the scholar Nancy Spector argues in a perspicacious catalogue essay.

Those seeking signs of distress will find them. In “Vertigo” (2019), a window and table are out of kilter, awkwardly askew, as if perspective is collapsing; a gray curtain dominates its left side, threatening to sweep over the picture. “The Mirror” (2018), a tiny gouache on paper, is all grays and blacks, a darkened room with a balcony that overlooks a flat, wan world.

But these are the exceptions. In both his art and his writing, Wong positioned living spaces as generative realms—of invention, and experimentation, and even safety, however fleeting. Some suggest caves, or wombs, or vulvae, but most are orderly living quarters.

It all started for Wong in these environs. The “first thing I remember doing out of my own creative volition,” he once said, was a still life that he snapped in his grandfather’s bedroom in Hong Kong around 2009 on his phone, a Nokia. “Something in me was pushed by an urge to visually reproduce the uncalculated, almost accidental slice of poetry in front of me,” he said.

Photography was Wong’s first artistic passion, but he was a restless talent and, around 2011, he began doing drawings and paintings. First he made abstractions, but then he began creating imaginative figurative works, seeing what he could conjure from within himself, rather than what he could capture out in the world.

In 2012, while pursuing a photography M.F.A. at the City University of Hong Kong, he wrote a brief poem, “Beckett,” that addresses his shift to paint and ink in playfully enigmatic terms:

In the vast room
He sat alone
In front of the painting
In silence
And after a while
He let out a sigh.

A sigh of contentment? Of failure? Both, it’s tempting to answer.

Wong’s interiors repeatedly exude an intense longing, even as they radiate accomplished visual splendor. In “Midday” (2018), a blood orange–colored flower leans achingly toward a window that frames a miniature pointillist seascape, a tiny sun high in the sky. “Sliver of Light” (2019) is a close-up of a door that is ever so slightly ajar. Brilliant white light is coming through the opening, which recalls a Barnett Newman “zip.” If only we could pass through.

The views from these windows, these redoubts of an artist’s life, are resplendent—they’re paintings within paintings, in myriad sub-styles. There are nods throughout Wong’s compositions to the fin de siècle Nabis, particularly Vuillard; Gertrude Abercrombie, when the mood turns surreal and moonlit; and David Hockney at his most effervescent. Vilhelm Hammershøi is here, with his air of spiritual possibility (and more rarely, foreboding), and so too is Jean Siméon Chardin, with his reverence for the quotidian, and the miracles that can be found there.

Even more than in his source material–scrambling landscapes, Wong evinces the rewards, the recompenses, of a life lived within art. He demonstrates how it allows you to see the world from new vantage points, even if you are inside all day and night, working on one painting after another.

This was not uncommon for the prolific artist. The gouache “4:30 P.M.” (2019) shines a beam of light on a table laden with cut flowers and a scissor (charged objects), a clock off in the corner with that time. A larger painting, “5 P.M.” (2019), delivers the same scene to even more dramatic effect, and the clock has moved ahead 30 minutes.

In another 2012 poem, “Ink Square,” Wong writes of a place that was “new/And barely furnished,” where “his first impulse/Had been to hang/The three drawings of squares/Right above the bed.” These were, he says a few lines later, “A shield against the silence/And all the things it never said.” This is art as a kind of talisman, or even armor.

One of Wong’s least immediately compelling interiors, I think, provides a key for understanding his worldview, his rare approach to both art and its history. It’s devoted to a tall bookshelf that is filled with slim volumes in a rainbow of colors. Tellingly, he titled it “Cosmos” (2018): a whole universe across eight shelves. Wong was a voracious researcher, plumbing through artists’ catalogues and websites, posting his finds online and incorporating them into his work.

There is, in Wong’s work, a sense that art can fortify life. You surround yourself with it, and it changes you. Marcel Proust’s narrator has that revelation in In Search of Lost Time as he sits inside a restaurant, marveling at used knives and “a discarded napkin upon which the sun would patch a scrap of yellow velvet.” Because “I had seen such things depicted in watercolors” by an artist in the novel, he realizes, he could see “their poetic beauty.” (It’s a sentiment not too far removed from Wong’s “accidental slice of poetry.”) “I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things,” the narrator says.

In an interior that Wong painted in his final year, even ordinary things have vanished. “Blue View” (2019) is just a few blue planes of subtly different hues. We may be at a window, looking out into the night—there appear to be a few stars in the sky—but it is hard to be certain. It is quiet, and serene, and maybe a little sad here. It could be “a room full/Of nothing,” as Wong wrote in 2013. “Would you like to stay/There for the night? Yes, I would like/To lie down here and fall asleep.”

“Blue View” is one of the most astonishing paintings I have ever seen. Reducing his language to its essentials, Wong seems to signal an end that carries with it a potential for renewal. That’s something that sleep offers, too, and as well as an empty room.