Painting with history 3 or two thousand five hundred and fifty nine years to figure stuff out

In the sign of Buddha, but also of Steve Jobs: in the multidisciplinary practice of the Thai artist, past and present, fantasy and reality, science and spirituality mix with great naturalness. The reception of Western art history, but above all memory, individual and collective, in the era of digital communication are the themes the artist deals with. The perspective is that of a digital native and cultural émigré from Thailand, which Arunanondchai left in 2009 for the United States.

The exhibition opens on the ground floor of Museion with three large “History Paintings (Poetry Floor)”, paintings on denim canvas on which the artist intervenes at various times. Another print is superimposed under the denim canvas, which depicts the canvas in its previous state of combustion. In these procedural works, references to abstract expressionism mix with the mechanisms of digital art in the days of Photoshop - all implemented by an artist who learned to paint with Microsoft Paint.

The journey continues with videos and installations - including several unpublished works - on the fourth floor of the museum. Here the artist creates an enveloping and engaging experience: thanks to special films, the glass facades and the ceiling lighting are transformed into colored surfaces, which dye the entire exhibition space red, yellow and blue. The three colors are the same ones used by the artist in his bodypainting performances inspired by the boob painters of the Thai television show Thailand’s got Talent.

The exhibition revolves around the video Painting with History in a Room Filled with Men with Funny Names 3 projected on a huge LED wall, which dominates the space in the center of the room. The video constitutes the epilogue of the artistic research begun by KA in 2012 and is part of a series - a sort of training novel on the apprenticeship of a painter of denim canvases (The Denim Painter), the artist’s fictitious double.

The figure is shaped by globalization, but at the same time brings together the Thai social and spiritual reality. Between fiction and reality, Eastern and Western aesthetics, a path of rebirth, research and purification of the painter unfolds. The rhythm and language are those of video clips. The comparison with the masters of twentieth century painting plays an important role in the hero’s education, from the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock to the anthropometries of Yves Klein, passing through Thai modernism, up to the Japanese Gutai group.

It is no coincidence that the funny names referred to in the title are the names of Western artists, which sound strange to an Eastern audience, but also Thai names which are unpronounceable to users of the European and American art world. In a game of appropriations and remixes, the history of Western painting is thus “swallowed up” and stripped of all sacredness. The long title of the exhibition „Painting with history 3 or two thousand five hundred and fifty nine years to figure stuff out“ also refers to the same research path. Here the numbers refer to the Buddhist calendar, in which year 1 corresponds to the year 543 BC; thus the 2559 mentioned in the title corresponds to 2016, the year of the exhibition in Bolzano.

To view the video, visitors are invited to sit on denim pillows, on a large blue carpet, in an atmosphere of relaxation and relationality. The light from the outside, filtered by colored films, is functional to the immersive character that the artist wants to give to the public’s experience. In this sense, all the other works installed around the video represent references to it: they are echoes, ghosts, real or virtual scenarios that arise from the world of the painter of denim canvases and maintain a direct, associative or evocative relationship with it.

The other videos from the series are also on display: Painting with History in a Room Filled with Men with Funny Names 1 and “2012-2555 (part 1 to the trilogy). The futuristic visions of the videos act as a plastic counterpart to the new works created for Museion: the “untitled (grounds)”. Presented on vertical panels, they are composed of layers of residual materials and robot fragments, which give them an explicit science fiction character. For the artist, these works represent a continuation of the “history Paintings” (exhibited on the ground floor) and the fragments of denim and burnt objects represent the containers of an empty body, after the spirit has dissolved following combustion.