Pressure is a major factor behind the creation of the artworks on show at "Stress Test", which is running at Supples Gallery, until Oct 4.
This is a solo exhibition by Wantaya Thitipaisal, aka Arm Wantaya, a self-taught artist from Bangkok who often draws on the mundanity of everyday life along with pressing and complex socio-political issues.
For him, a line becomes a shape and a shape becomes a problem. Rather than resolving it, he adds pressure, building the work until it becomes a more obvious problem than when it started. This is the concept behind this show where competing forces are held together long enough to see what survives.
These paintings compress things the artist keeps running into -- advertising, comics, religious ritual, family memory, the conditions of daily life in Bangkok. Separate subjects that arrived together and are painted that way. Figures collapse into objects, bodies into architecture, the recognisable into something harder to place.
Across the exhibition, abstraction and figuration are in open contest. In some works, figuration holds its ground, a hand or a face pushing through clearly enough to anchor the composition.
In others, abstraction takes over almost entirely, leaving only fragments -- an ear, a limb, a gesture -- as evidence that something recognisable was there to begin with. Neither side wins and that unresolved tension is where the paintings generate their charge.
The palette carries much of this duality.
In this show, the artist moves between soft, pastel hues and passages of deep, near-black tone, often within the same canvas.
The darker passages tend to sit closest to the personal and the lighter pastel tones carry something more playful. The effect throughout is emotive and physical rather than illustrative. What each viewer takes from the work is entirely their own.
Supples Gallery is on Charoen Krung 43 and opens Thursday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm.
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