Current Exhibitons

11 Oct 2024         Maybe, Let’s Just Be Friends (Solo), Auxier Kline       


Recent Exhibitions

8 May 2024         Eastern Standard, Armature Projects
22 Feb 2024         leftovers, island83
12 Feb 2024         Blurr, Temple Gallery
05 Jan 2024         Queer Naturalism, Auxier Kline

_{Install for “Maybe, Let’s Just Be Friends” (Solo) at Auxier Kline}

11 Oct – 8 Nov, 2024 

Auxier Kline is pleased to present Maybe, Let’s Just Be Friends (2024), an exhibition of fifteen new paintings by the Brooklyn based artist Tin Nguyen.

False starts, distant romances, and nostalgic moments of tenderness are the poetic vignettes that orbits within this cosmos of paintings. Each painting is charged with an emotional imprint of cinematically lived moments inspired by episodes of fleeting connections. Maybe, Let’s Just Be Friends shows a constellation of emotions as the story transitions from the intimacy of private interiors to in-between spaces, and finally reconciling within the natural world.

There’s no hierarchy to these different settings. The framing is close and tightly cropped, and the atmosphere is layered between melancholia, eroticism, and introspection. Nguyen’s work is driven by this dedication to perceiving lived moments, especially in the easily overlooked everyday ones that can quickly vanish in seconds; it's within this perception and detailed observation (both externally and emotionally inwards) that he believes time expands and deep wisdom emerges.

Nguyen writes, “I’m drawn to the dramatic nature of melancholia as how a temperature shift can manifest these complex feelings, with blue being a dominant color in certain paintings, such as in “lay your head down (do not forget me)”. I’m reflecting on the moment of facing the reality of a connection that cannot be more than friends, that continues through recalling the absence of a body in “you go to bed alone, and i am not in the mood for anything”. I think about Bluets by Maggie Nelson, which resonated with me during the transformative aftermath of a breakup:  “I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.”

But just as blue can stir up feelings of grief and sadness, green emerges as a force of renewal and healing energy; green, which is the color of the heart chakra, is also the grass that embraces the wild flowers in “the earth flowers, where it last rained”. Maybe, Let’s Just Be Friends returns to another theme of the artist, closely observing nature as a teacher. Nature knows how to move on; she reminds us to let go of what doesn’t serve us with ease and grace. Her flowers unfold in their own time, reflected in “the poppies appear, again; maybe also next year” as we recognize ourselves in these bloomed fields. In the sequential paintings of “I asked for nothing (and yet, you came crashing in)”, we’re brought to the ocean and her waves—it’s a hopeful reminder that being connected to life is to be connected to movement, and it's within movement where we can fully open ourselves up to new possibilities.