Installation view, with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4, 2018, video installation and performance, J1, Marseille © Korakrit Arunanondchai 2020; courtesy the artist; Carlos / Ishikawa, London; and J1, Marseille. Photographer Benjamin Bechet (J1, Marseille)
The launch of David Zwirner’s online exhibition series, “Platform,” will debut their London series today, on April 17th, and running through May 15th. A dozen notable London galleries will be featured including CARLOS / ISHIKAWA, which represents Thai multimedia artist, Korakrit Arunanondchai. With a practice embedded in a philosophical pretense of searching and affixing to no single modality, he lets the liminality between forms guide his work. From a multi-layered practice—which includes filmmaking, painting, installation, and performance—he reflects on technology and spirituality, the accumulation of data, fragility of memory, interfaces between world history and personal experience, and the Anthropocene.
Korakrit Arunanondchai “History painting (frame)” 2020. Inkjet print on canvas, gel medium, bleached denim, stretcher. 86 x 64 in.
Korakrit Arunanondchai “Painting with history, the Red Sea” 2020. Inkjet print on canvas, gel medium, bleached denim, stretcher. 68 x 48 in.
The series presented for this online exhibition, _History Paintings,_ is a remarkable testament to process and evaluation of form. Though assimilated to the construction of canvas, Arunanondchai operates in the subliminal subtense of this final stage by incorporating stretched denim—tie-dyed with bleach, burnt and patched up with photographic renderings of the very flames that scorched them. The works are engaged and speak in parallel to his ongoing _Painting With History_ films, most recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
At a scale that allows space to submerge, each painting offers a landscape of feeling, a testament to truth and an emblem of remorse. In the spaces between singed edges and bleeding hues, there is an offering of unavoidable humanity—a hidden quality that seduces through the tactility of pain in his use of materiality. Spaces of paint, flames, and unfinished edges embolden new colors and audaciously call the viewer to look into the scope of chaos. The title of the series constructs an honoring and contemplative gaze towards time, our place within it: history both as political and personal. A narrative bred not in a singularity, but rather the scope of what the collective carries, has lived, and survived.
Korakrit Arunanondchai “Painting with history (bodypainting)” 2020. Inkjet print on canvas, gel medium, bleached denim, stretcher. 86 x 64 in.
Korakrit Arunanondchai “untitled (painting with history),” 2018. Inkjet print on canvas, gel medium, bleached denim, gold foil, stretcher. 86 × 64 in.
.jpg)
