essay
Suppositions and the Grammar of Painting
Much of my work deals with various aspects of truth and illusion and their complex interplay with the nature of beauty, dreams, hopes and perfection. One explanation for this may be my attitude toward the nature of painting and what it means to be a painter. It seems to me that the role of painting and painters has always been to distill the truth from the things we see and to portray it from different angles. But because of the complexities and contradictions of modern life, painting alone may no longer be able to fulfill this role.
Any attempt to portray and posit suppositions about the nature of reality, given the complexities of the world around us, is a matter of trial and error and requires a search for a new kind of grammar in the language of painting.
Near the end of 2005, I made some sketches for a series of paintings. I was inspired by the impact of current tastes and lifestyles as well as ancient Greek and Roman forms found in Asian societies, and by some earlier paintings I had done in 2002-2003.
In preparation for starting work on the paintings, I collected newspaper clippings and brochures for real estate projects and a number of major commercial projects under construction in Bangkok. The clippings gave me a fairly clear sense of contemporary values and what for many people today constitutes good taste and happiness.
Then I worked out a number of suppositions and a pictorial grammar to express the observations I had made. I assembled and classified odd fragments of images, taken from different sources and made for different purposes, in order to create something meant to be beautiful and exceptional. In this way, the resulting paintings are a reflection of a certain abstract quality that hovers over our society and the environment in which we live our lives. The world today is a place of conflict and agreement, faith and defiance, fantasy and idealism. We live in an environment of many contrasting forces all mixed together, and out of this complexity, we can get a glimpse of a certain truth about modern life – that living with any kind of awareness or understanding of everything that surrounds us is no easy task, because it is all covered over by illusions of perfection, dreams and beauty.