Sorbonne Artgallery

Tomas Vu was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and at the age of ten years, moved with his family to El Paso, in Texas. After graduating from Fine Arts from the University of Texas (El Paso), then a master’s degree at Yale University. He is a professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts since 1996 and has been appointed professor of visual arts LeRoy Neiman in 2000. In 1996, Vu helped found the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. Since its creation, it has the position of director/artistic director of the Neiman.

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In 2001, the towers fell and, a month later, I learned that I would be a father. From this turbulent period was born the Flatland series. Through Flatland, I created a landscape that allows the fusion of opposing and conflicting forces: destruction and recovery, chaos and clarity, brutality and civility. These polarities arise from the battle constant playing in my head enters memory and reality, more precisely the memory of a distinct landscape that has been the present psychological reality combines memory, desire and uncertainty with the illusion of space and the physicality of the surface. This game of perceptual power, the excessively waged war between light and darkness, is embodied not only in the use of chiaroscuro, but also in the exhibition.

When completed, the Flatland series will include 102 prints, each with a time title. These 102 pieces represent the 102 minutes elapsed between the impact on the first twin tower and the collapse of the second. In doing so, the prints are transformed into individual objects, into something closer to the still image of a film. They are a slice of a floating set, in constant motion. When these works are installed for shows, they occupy a grid, often passing from darkness to light, thus becoming fragments of moving landscapes and, taken together, they give an impression of movement through time.”