Bruegel depicted many things that cannot be depicted… In all his works more is always implied than is depicted.[1]
—Abraham Ortelius
Swirling Dream-Wreck is the second exhibition to bring together paintings by Fu-On Chung and Sam Thomas. The first, ‘Nets’, was held towards the end of 2016 at GLOVEBOX, an artist-run space founded by Chung and several others in 2015 (and sadly now defunct). In the chaos of preparing for an overseas trip, I missed the show. However, the idea of the pairing intrigued me. I was aware that Chung and Thomas were close, having shared a studio space in the suburb of Parnell in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, but I was unsure how their works would play off one another. Indeed, I wondered if the artists were more interested in underscoring the diversity of painting than in teasing out affinities between their practices. …
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[1] See Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art 1400–1600: Sources and Documents (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 37.
