ARTWORKS Bui Chat
“I paint to give form to what is abstract within me… Once it takes shape, I exhale.”
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The paintings of do not produce poetry, nor do they illustrate it. They exist instead as a provisional form—one that speaks to the living, breathing nature of painting itself. Images emerge not after everything has been fully thought through, but prior to thought. In aesthetic terms, this can be described as a moment of “revelation”: when an image erupts directly from intuition, before reason has the chance to organize it.
More than a decade of artistic practice by , when closely observed, is not sustained by professional ambition or the pursuit of position. It is nourished instead by precisely what he has written about himself: the inner layers of abstraction that must be “drawn outward.” He regards painting as a form of diary without narrative—one that records not events, but the sheer “presence” of abstract fragments extracted at a particular moment in time.
As he once wrote:
“I paint, ultimately, not in order to become a painter. I paint to give form to what is abstract within me. Once it takes shape, I feel a release—I exhale, and I am able to continue living.”
“In an era when many artists strive to make everything perfect, preserves the wet marks, the rough edges, the trembling traces of the moment a painting first comes into being. It is precisely this insistence that renders the 13th exhibition a turning point: an exhibition of expanded intuition, of disarmed openness, of an artist painting from the deepest part of himself—where color is no longer a language, but simply breath made visible.”
Written by Sculptor Le Trong Nghia for Cu Tuong (Bui Chat’s 13th Exhibition)
Collection
Bay Tam Nam
“In this project, each painting is a countdown clock. Every glance from the viewer is another tick forward. When you stand before it, you are looking at a process of disappearance, not a state of presence. I want viewers to feel what is passing, rather than what remains.”
