In 1967, Lebadang finished two paintings which were like a foundation or matrix of his future work. The background was divided into several surfaces or facets, clear or dark, a point or a line, a luminous point which seems to lead the gaze, a liens which separates and structures the picture. The background is textured with something fluid, then rubbed and wiped with a cloth. On top, the forms, drawn with light touches, look as though they are intertwined and appear to come out of the background. The first painting shows a tree under an orange moon, the second is a horse galloping through a twilit landscape. The palette is orange and red enhanced with white and yellow for the light colors and brown and black, with blue, for the dark colours.
For the first time, in the bottom right hand corner of the picture and above the signature the artist placed a little colored rectangle, like the seal of an oriental print.
LEBADANG, “Tree under the Moon”, 1967, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. Lebadang Art Foundation, Huế, Viêt Nam. Rights reserved.
LEBADANG, “Horse at Sunset”, 1967, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Lebadang Art Foundation, Huế, Viêt Nam. Rights reserved.
« Indomitable Landscape »
Between 1970 and 1973, he completed a series of paintings Paysage indomptable (Indomitable Landscape) on the theme of the Vietnam War. The paintings are in black and white in the style of Chu Ta, but in a more heightened style, with the movements of the brush appearing like calligraphic signs, combining image and language with flashes of light, displacements of material, flows of colour, projections, with the paint erased representing abstract landscapes where the Hồ Chí Minh trail is shown as a red line. War landscapes.
Horses
Horses were to become one of his favorite themes which he would modulate using several kinds of media and different materials.
Flowers – Trees
In 1977, he worked on the portfolio Fleurs Série (Series of Flowers) and exhibited at the Galerie Pierre Hautot in Paris, large oil paintings representing sexualized orchids in strange-looking shapes displayed in a range of blue and purple. The subject of the vase and the twig appears in blue compositions.
Buddha
In 2002, after a journey to Angkor Vat, he began the Bouddha (Buddha) series, large portraits where Buddha’s face, with the eyes closed, seems to emerge from a silken and flecked material made by « dripping » and projections in light passes merging into each other. The dominant colour of the paintings is blue. Some are sepia brown on a white background. He was to continue this series until the period of the Cosmic Family (Cosmic Family) in 2010.
Eyes
Interlacing of lines, swirls, planets or expanded galaxies or images of the cosmos, eyes are traversed by a red line. Sometimes, they are circumscribed in a box, the edges of the box are the edges of the canvas.
« Cosmic Family »
The Cosmic Family series contains his latest works. Mainly oil on canvas in dominant of blue as well as diptychs representing the family and birth, with the omnipresent figure of Buddha.
Large paintings
In 1965, he completed a large painting (120 x 700 cm) on the Viêt Nam war. It was the same year Lyndon Baines ordered aerial raids, unleashing operation Rolling Thunder, and authorized the use of Napalm.
In 1976, he created a large abstract painting (220 x 800 cm) representing a large landcape between the mountains and the sky, in black and white, with a dominant of blue, to which he added three spots of red colour (a dot, a line, the seal) which with the signature underline the horizontal composition. This work, characterized by its tendency to abstraction and a greater freedom, may be considered the completion of the series Paysage indomptable (Indomitable Landscape), the format requiring large strokes and a fluidity of the medium.
In the same year, a large painting (114 x 648 cm), composed of four separated panels, continued the series of the portfolio La Nature prie sans paroles (Nature prays without words). Those four panels represent calligraphies against a background of mountainous landscapes. The palette is predominantly red-orange with earthen colours and ochres, counterbalanced by yellows and blue.
