You can easily miss the turn into H Gallery Chiang Mai. A small road forks off the highway at Mae Rim, skirting along an irrigation canal, and a patchwork of verdant paddies, glistening in the July drizzle, opens up like a vision. At a curve as the road takes a slight dip downhill, there is a building covered with hanging vines and bursting flowers. A gallery snuck away in the middle of northern rice fields is not an anomaly but a continuation of Chiang Mai's vast possibility. There you go, a trip to the venue is already an attraction in itself.
On our visit late last month, Giles Ryder was installing his multicoloured abstract paintings in the space — a sturdy, brick-walled room with a spiral staircase leading up to the rooftop, which overlooks the green fields. Ryder, an Australian who's based in Bangkok and doing an Asialink Arts Residency in Chiang Mai, was preparing for his double shows centred around multicoloured grid paintings. Opening at H Project Space in Bangkok tomorrow is "Tropical Malice" and on Aug 15 "Hardcore Still Lives" opens at H Gallery Chiang Mai.
"The two series talk to each other," said Ryder. "The formal language, the texture, the colour. Ideally, you should see both."
That cloudy afternoon, Ryder was putting up the work in "Hardcore Still Lives" — a series of geometric paintings made up of coloured grids, part-Mondrian, part-pha khao ma, and altogether hypnotising. There were three smaller oil pieces resembling kaleidoscopic whirlpools, with crusted globules of paint forming what the artist cheekily described as "bubblegum" (or perhaps miniature volcanoes and their colourful magma). Also in the series are three large, vertical banners, again in coloured grids, and the influence of the homely pa khao ma fabric was conspicuous.
Ryder, who's been in Thailand full-time for two years, is doing his residency at Ne'Na Contemporary Artspace, also in Chiang Mai's Mae Rim district. That's where he created his new works in the show at the two H galleries.
"The place inspires you definitely," said the artist. "The pa khao ma, sure! The transparent quality of it, the stripes, the [feeling] that it is a painting going in one direction.
Pa khao ma inspired vertical painting.
"The landscape here too. It's very flat — yes there are some mountains, but generally in Thailand everything is flat. [The paintings] are a little landscape-like as well. I'm interested in the concept of line in Thai culture, and also in the material value — material as in, say, the fabric, and material as in materialism."
The appearance of symmetry, and of the interplay between colours in his grid paintings, Ryder said, were not entirely planned from the beginning. In the process, he started by painting the background of a primary colour, then he overlaid it with different colours, and the result — once you step closer to inspect — resembles a weaving technique where some threads go on top of the others, or sometimes they go underneath.
"It is intuitive in a way. The paint itself is still active when I intermix different colours, so at some points you're not sure what the pictures are going to do," he said. That's why the surface "reaction" of the paint produces metallic sheen, or sometimes a fluorescent effect, as well as edge bleeding. The geometric grace — the clean-cut checker lines — reveal surprising, spontaneous disorder once you contemplate the paintings up close.
"They're not perfect. They're not supposed to be," he said.
Ryder has been doing conceptual work, paintings and LED light sculptures for over a decade, and exhibited in Melbourne, Sydney, Berlin and London before taking up a stint at Bangkok University International and King Mongkut's University of Technology Ladkrabang. Now his new show is taking his abstract art to the bustling streets of Bangkok and the lonely fields of Chiang Mai — almost simultaneously.
"Abstract paintings have a long legacy, but the original vocabulary has changed a lot," he said. "My work here is referencing Mondrian, but it's not Mondrian. It's trying to do something else — there's the material difference and aesthetic difference. I play with the language, and I hope it talks to people through the visual, the colour and the physicality of the canvass and the object. There's a certain freedom in all of this. It's not expressionistic, but I feel we can express something here."
'Tropical Malice' opens tomorrow at H Project Space, Sathon 12. 'Hardcore Still Lives' opens Aug 15 at H Gallery Chiang Mai.
One of the grid paintings in 'Hardcore Still Lives'.
