SOCIÉTÉ

“What have you done to my water?” the Lord asked in a 2013 short story by Joy Williams. “My living water…” “Oh,” the engineers said, “we thought that was just a metaphor,” their pipes defiling the fluid the Lord sipped from his glass.

Literal talk is seldom wise. Don’t figures of speech press with some other kind of weight, double as vessels, a reality lodged within the word? Symbols, it turns out, are not mere abstractions, but structurally, if not sacredly, material bodies that call for concern.

In keeping with a certain legacy of her painting genre, that is what does not happen in Anh Trần’s abstractions. Mercurial, graphic, nervous, generous, her signs do point to something beyond themselves and yet wallow in a physicality hard to translate into a tongue we know. Grounded and ungrounded at once.

We are left to conjure a subterranean dragon ghost on the canvas (Are the clouds in the Oculo like oblivion?), a very cloudy metropolis (It isn’t cold if you have a dream), a diaphanous set of nanobacteria (Tracing all the pain in my heart)—all works from 2025. What lingers is a sense of drifting outlines. And yet none of them hold, as if the familiar were about to take shape, but unwilling to resolve. Watery. Diluted, pale at times, but mainly quicksilver, romantic, lush, slapdash, jagged, feral, decadent, irreducible signs that work as both language and residue—that signify and are.

Closed Place, Open Word (2025) is a landscape of sorts, a triptych. Dried blood-brown fields ooze and crash into jittery dribbles on all panels, while Byzantine blues block the surface in bulky turns. Black strokes sweep across from left to right: one straight, others squiggled. “It used to be the river,” Trần called the horizontal line in an interview. “A mark I’ve been making since I came [from Vietnam] to Europe. Fundamentally, it’s a way for me to pull back from these expressive, chaotic, very busy backgrounds […]. I keep repeating it unconsciously, so it must mean something to me.”

White, ovoid marks scatter like leaves blown across that river while the majority accumulate, skittishly, in dense clusters. The eyes roam with no place to settle. It’s crowded. Yet what unsettles most are the gold oilstick “anh” marks, her name, lowercase, repeated one, two, three, four, five, six times on the blue backgrounds. Each is rubbed, crossed over by a last gold stroke, some almost erased, others still clearly glinting beneath the overruns. Are they regrets? Remedies?