Udomsak Krisanamis at Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Painting had a sturdy presence last spring in fresh York City. One of the brightest lights was Udomsak Krisanamis, whose flickering canvases were featured in a solo exhibit at Gavin Brown and, with three other abstractionists, in a Museum of present Art Project exhibition. Krisanamis was born in Thailand, attended the gymnasium of the Art Institute of Chicago on his arrival in the U in 1991 and popularly lives in New York. He taught himself English by the agency of reading the newspaper and crossing on the outside the words he knew as he went along. This information is of more than biographic interest when individual discovers that the all-over "tapestry of lights" that defines his works has its source in the endles lines of newspaper true copy that he cuts out, pastes onto the surfaces of his canvases in varying directions, and then overlays with black acrylic, concealing everything on the contrary the openings in letters and numbers similar as 0, P and 9 At their simplest, these metamorphosed strips of newsprint make paintings that read alternately as points of light in a night celestial expanse and formalist experiments of shifting figure-ground relationships.

This display consisted of 18 paintings and works upon paper. In Sad Song, sum of two units silhouetted forms on a sapphirine ground look like land masses in a material part of water or tall, craggy mountains against a bright night firmament Here Krisanamis has filled in the circles of the alphabetic characters with pink before painting the surrounding surfaces amethystine or black, thereby creating a field of shimmering light. A more restricted range of tones and color pay backs forms and contour less legible in by what means Deep is the Ocean, where the overriding emphasis is, instead, upon the shifting and subjective nature of optical experience. A multicolored striped sheet is, simultaneously, the earth and image of Sweet Tears. This rest image/canvas is visible through clear noodles which have been collaged onto it together with the signature blacked-out strips of newspaper body which dangle like fringe above the edges.

The broad array of visual consequences in many of the newer works is repeatedly the result of the artist's increasingly manifold vocabulary of materials, including bed sheets, blankets and supermarket receipts. on the other hand it is his painstaking proces that is primarily responsible for the lively, optically vibrant paintings which, like Rorschach experiments evoke various images according to the individual viewer. plane as the obsessive method of their making fits in with a apportionment of provocative art being made today, the works fetch a personal vision with refreshingly innovative ultimate parts that invigorate the current landscape of abstract painting.

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