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Anywhere anytime anyhow

I made a two-person show with Panya Vijinthanasarn, a leading Thai painter at Ardel’s Third Place Gallery. Ardel Gallery is a major Thai gallery with four venues in Bangkok – the Director was selector of the Thai Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

We are both concerned with the way formal language derived from patterning can be used in paintings and the complex, and in this case, transcultural questions this raises. This show was part of a series of exhibitions I held including a solo show at Matthew Bown Gallery London, 2007 and Robert Steele Gallery New York, 2010. The focus of these shows derived from a journey to Japan where I witnessed a Japanese friend dressing up as a Geisha for the day (a Japanese fun activity) in Gion, Kyoto. This event and the patterning on the kimono became a key reference for these shows. During the dressing up procedure her face lost its identity becoming itself a painting, constructed under layers of make up. Similarly the Kimono provided a disguise, densely layered with an artifice of intricate detail. Accompanying these paintings were a series of paintings also derived during this Japanese journey called ‘Bleeding Cherry Blossoms’ where the crimson cherry blossoms pour and drip down the paintings. The painterly quality is allowed to overwhelm the image. I was looking at the way the materiality of paint can influence the mood (in this case sadness) in tandem with the narrative imagery.

The exhibition was opened by the Mayor of Bangkok, filmed for television, reviewed in the Bangkok Post, and featured in the Bangkok Art Map. A 28 page colour catalogue accompanied the exhibition.