The new Thavibu Gallery exhibition "Syrinx", by Alison Wilson and Dominic Fondé, is not by itself worth the trip if you are not already in the neighbourhood of Silom.
It's not that these bird drawings and engravings are not good. Wilson and Fondé have managed to capture the creatures in moments of grace and truthfulness with admirable photographic precision, but we've seen stuff like this too many times before.
A painting by Fernando Franciosi.
The only reason we might stop by is because Prasert Yodkaew's "Pretermined" is still on view one floor up at Tang Contemporary Art, in the same Jewelry Trade Center building. Prasert's mixed media paintings and installation of fallen angels, featured in Life earlier this month, is well worth either a visit or revisit.
While most drawings in "Syrinx" have the quality to calm rather than excite, one particular set by Fondé has a story to tell; a dialogue with the sense of desperation in Prasert's works.
The only birdless set in the show, Fondé's bird's-eye-view drawings shows feathers falling towards the city grid below. While seeing one immaculate drawing after another can prove tedious over time, the roughness in this set, which is about telling the story rather than exact representation, is indeed quite refreshing. Fondé's freezing of this imminent downfall is optimistically sad.
The most exciting art event of this month was the visual artists and musicians collaboration project "A Part Of You, A Part Of Me 2" at The Jam Factory, which drew a mass crowd of hipsters to the space's green field. The works by artists like Lek Kiatsirikajorn, Nut Sawasdee and Makha Sanewong Na Ayuthaya were inspired by a collection of bands like Hariguem Zaboy, Flower Dog and Free Typewriter, who put on a show on the day. A video installation by Lek, inspired by the song Morning by Napat Snidvongs, is simple yet powerfully relevant to our modern age. The video shows a random person browsing the internet, particularly Facebook. With the video shot from the user's eye view, this seemingly personal browsing suddenly becomes a universal experience that the viewers share.
As we anticipate another exciting year of visual art, the sad news is that Toot Yung Art Center is no longer.
The space's artistic director Myrtille Tibayrenc will continue to curate at other spaces, so we hope Toot Yung will soon find a new home with an outdoor area with a similar big shady tree, fun DJ set and cold Beer Laos. In the meantime, the neighbourhood has been compensated somewhat with a new group show "Tropikos" by Brazillian and Thai artists at W District's Hof Art in Phra Khanong. Personally, this is the first show since its launch last year that the works have broken away from what we usually expect of a "Hof Art exhibition".
Torlarp Larpjaroensook's series of mixed media paintings imitating a weather pressure map could have been a solo show. During and after the painting process, Torlarp exposed the pieces of artworks to the elements by putting his canvases out in the rain. While this technique did well in expressing his wonder at the unpredictability of nature, the wires Torlarp later put out to outlines these maps are at the same time about the human desire and struggle to control. Such a concept is echoed in Fernando Franciosi's installation, featuring toy cockroaches trapped and moving blindly around square blocks.
My personal favourite from the show was Franciosi's piece from his drawing series. On a clean white canvas, there's a drop of silver paint, a piece of thread, a few colourful buttons, a pin, and what looks like a pill strip gathered in a small area among an expanse of white background. I like the painting for its reluctance to present itself and the fact that I don't know what the artist is trying to say.
Contact kaonap@bangkokpost.co.th if you have any comments or news on art events.
