BEN TONG The Violet Hour

Night Gallery is proud to present The Violet Hour, an exhibition of new paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Ben Tong. This is Tong’s solo debut with the gallery and follows his participation in the 2022 group show Shrubs.

At the end of her 1989 novel Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson writes: “…even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.” What is most familiar to us proves elusive in form, subject to change with the sun, only to later reappear as itself. California light plays this dimensional trick especially well. It is ancient and ephemeral, absorbing into the sides of mountains and low-lying shrublands, piercing concrete driveways, gliding along Pacific saltwater. Sunlight immerses us in recollection and pure presence. 

Profoundly influenced by the Californian atmosphere, Ben Tong’s enigmatic paintings radiate from within and between such expanses of “empty space and points of light.” The title The Violet Hour alludes to the dreamlike threshold just before nightfall, when the outside world is bathed in the deepest entanglement of light and shadow. The air murmurs with tension and stillness as it gives way to something that glows. In his newest body of work, Tong excavates the painted field as one would their own memory, establishing a luminous tone through gesture and material interaction. 

The dynamic nature of Tong’s process resonates with the evocative impact of the final paintings. His canvases are open and unburdened yet conscious, charged with thought. Tong often utilizes unconventional tools—ranging from rags to a massage gun—to continuously impress oil paint upon the canvas. The inherent unpredictability of this approach allows the artist to remain open to what may emerge, to be a transmitter for chaos and unactivated imagery. Shapes surface from the repeated acts of painting and wiping away, washed in vivid hues of purple, blue, orange, and pink. Little rainbows revisit various scenes, refracting wavelengths from an unknown origin. Action begets meaning, rather than the other way around.  

Flowers, glass vessels, the hazy suggestion of a chandelier. Glimmers of traditional still life anchor Tong’s paintings in loose clarity, creating a viewing experience that negotiates the phenomenological and the representational. The works’ mesmerizing quality derives from Tong’s uncanny ability to refine forms down to their essence as embodiments of light, exalted and murky. This is an offering of natural and artistic generosity—the light is provisional, but it always comes back. 

—Jayne Pugh