Udomsak Krisanamis Modern Man (It Wasn’t Me)
Gallery , Bangkok 21 January – 19 March
Evoking night skies, firing pistons, flyposted alleys and much more besides, Udomsak Krisanamis’s eervescent mixed-media collages are all about suggestion rather than solidity. But that hasn’t stopped admirers trying to square the Thai artist’s simple yet expressive modular language of found materials and blacked-out words or numerals with his taciturn character. The apocryphal tale is that his habit of leaving only the empty spaces in ‘O’, ‘0’, ‘8’ and ‘9’ visible – a process resulting in densely reticulated fields and grids – began while he struggled to learn English in New York, and that he still does it due to his introversion.
None of this biographical baggage is openly contested here (the exhibition text is an excerpt from a monologue by the late American comedian George Carlin), but who needs words when you have Black Sabbath T-shirts, a Tupac poster and two hairy Neanderthal sculptures crawling across the floor? Through a storage unit-like hodgepodge of Krisanamis’s recent work and favourite things (gifts, collectibles, finds), Modern Man (It Wasn’t Me) decentres his mythologised interiority by placing his exteriority – his low, down-to-the-ground view of the world – everywhere. Some of these juxtapositions of object and collage spur connections: between the serpentine car-racing track and slaloming bands of colour, between salvaged fishnets and the wiry chaos of found tennis strings mounted behind acrylic sheets, etc. In so doing, they suggest that a pareidolic knack for finding patterns, as well as materials, in empirical randomness – the exposed metal frame of a spring mattress, say – informs Krisanamis’s abstractions more than any internal tussle with assimilation, learning or shyness.
His work may also be a kind of algorithmic translation of sports and music. A painting of Fidel Castro on the putting green with Che Guevara, among other golf-themed paintings, muddies the use of negative space: could the ‘O’ shape occurring ad infinitum be no more than an insignia inspired by Krisanamis’s favourite pastime – zeroing in on perfect holes? Meanwhile, in yet another attempt to bring us down to the level of his lived life, he oers up interactive pursuits: visitors can strum an electric guitar, bang a drumkit or play ping pong. This contravention of the passive gallery experience feels less like institutional critique than an insouciant admission that Krisanamis considers his magpie process profoundly ordinary – and doesn’t give a fig if he’s found out. Like my playing Boys Don’t Cry badly (no one heard, thankfully), his art – as astonishing as it often is to look at – begins with little more than a rudimentary level of commitment, awareness and muscle memory (those hollow circles, ovals and grids don’t repeat themselves), he suggests. And unlike elitist sports such as, well, golf, anyone can have a go. Max Crosbie-jones