Note: Julien Nguyen is a painter of extraordinary skill whose works take as much influence from Renaissance paintings as they do from gaming aesthetics. His practice is at once deeply academic, informed by the philosophies and aesthetic precedents of art history, and immediately colloquial, populated by his friends and contemporaries. Entitled Jung Fatale from 2015, the present work ranks among the very best of Nguyen’s concise oeuvre. Alluding to psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the present work is at once philosophical and poetic.

Nguyen takes a huge amount of influence from the Italian renaissance. He has created works after Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Piero della Francesca. The present work recalls the attenuated precision of Raphael, whose portraiture provided precedent for the exact and precise mode of depiction that Nguyen deploys here. Nguyen has spoken about his reliance on this period: “I’m drawn to certain artists and certain ways of making, certain techniques of depiction, that tend to come from the early Renaissance. But it’s a question of method, not style. During this period, painting became a form of philosophical play. The way in which these artists began to think about and collect art is actually very similar to where contemporary art ended up in the twentieth century. Renaissance painters did not simply try to reproduce what was in front of them or arrange pleasing shapes in a field but sought to bring something into life through an analogous process of physically constructing or building or growing it in their pictures. Take the landscapes in the backgrounds of many Renaissance paintings, where painters took elements from their own region and projected them onto Palestine or Egypt or wherever the tale is set. They’re constructed like stages, like dioramas, or like maps in a video game. The conjuring aspect is really powerful. I’ll say this in the language of the time: They’re bringing to life their own genius” (Julien Nguyen cited in: Travis Diehl, ‘Julien Nguyen: Julien Nguyen on the Renaissance, conjury, and painting himself’, Artforum, July 2021, online).

Within the fantastical dimensions and intimate niches of his painterly tableau, Julien Nguyen revisits foundational narratives of Western history and mythology, delicately negotiating omnipresent themes of power, desire, and spirituality in the subjectivity of his contemporary male muses. The distinctively anachronistic universes of Nguyen’s celebrated portraiture unravel his rich constellations of both historical and stylistic inspirations, which connect modern science fiction to Early Renaissance paintings of the fifteenth century to Japanese manga. Made implicit in the present work, Nguyen’s artistic ethos finds deep resonance in the vernacular of Renaissance humanism, particularly as he elicits its latent erotic nuances. According to curator Steven Matijcio, “The relatively common Renaissance custom of the painter incorporating his young assistants (often lovers), as characters within these scenes heightens the sexual charge of the composition… Centuries later, the eros of Nguyen’s paintings in this ongoing tradition smolder quietly, but feverishly as he ‘queers’ his mythical evocations with the sinuous bodies and stoic visages of friends and lovers.” (Steven Matijcio, Exh. Brochure, Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center, Julien Nguyen: Returns, 2019 (online))