John Hurrell – 16 November, 2024

This collection of eleven works is a handpicked survey, selected from four decades of painting and photogram-producing practice, and positioned in three smallish rooms. Fong is well known for the elegant, moody and spatially inventive, geometric abstractions that she began making in the early 1990s. The works here are modestly sized, being clearly suitable for domestic as well as institutional walls.

In her pictorial allusions Fong gravitates towards small or even mega expanses containing hovering and atom or planet-like curved geometries. Usually featuring gold or copper leafed ‘brush strokes’, and dark floating ovals, or matte flock-filled or cut-out circles clinging to the picture plane, these sumptuous colourful and atmospheric paintings (so rich in imaginative micro/macro-cosmic references) beguile with their stencilled darting cadences, intensely visceral hues and soft hazy flickering, evanescent shadow-laden surfaces.

There are also two stunning, vertically oriented, photograms revelling in stacked organic and intricate black and white forms. Both from the UFO series of 1995.

Made between 1993 and 2024, there is in Nexus an exciting range of approaches to composition on display, while many wide frames are painted too, effortlessly incorporated with each central (mostly) rectangular image.

Fong’s dark, ‘mystical’, spatially inventive paintings are easily remembered from towards the end of last century, but looking at this show, her love of gorgeous toe-curling colour is an unexpected revelation, especially with blues, silvers, golds and oranges. They celebrate optical sensuality and sly ‘cosmic’ spatial shifts that draw you in. She also happens to be expert at making evocative rhythmic forms with very thin, dark, deftly manipulated and layered paint.

When she uses board as a support for paint application (she occasionally uses canvas) Fong sometimes incorporates large or small, single circularly cut holes that reveal the bright white wall behind and which reference inner music-record sleeves—but which don’t have traces of shadow or depth. Instead they hover in front, like full moons. These take on a peculiar symbolic quality, avoiding naturalism-becoming ultra-ghostly-but enforcing architectural context. They proclaim: Hey look. This is indoors; not a night sky, but a wall. Hooray for artificiality!

John Hurrell

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