Udomsak Krisanamis

“In Udomsak’s earliest works, meaning slips and skitters across their smooth monochromatic surfaces or sinks between the pin pricks of light in a blanket of black. In his later paintings, it is buried in fine layers of paper or noodles, concealed under thick blobs of colour. We are tricked into following the pasta rivulets outlined in black, or the loops and zigzags that emerge from a chaos of collaged layers and shapes. Perhaps most legible are his works on paper, often whole sheets of newspaper worked over with collage or paint. The visible text or images offer a hook to hang on to: rows of figures from the financial pages, a black and white shot of Tiger Woods in mid-swing. We grab onto snippets of language that could give us a clue but for Udomsak language is an opaque medium”.
Kirsty Bell, Berlin based art critic. Catalogue for the Kunsthalle Basel, 2003.

Thai born, New York based artist Udomsak Krisanamis is best known for his richly textured collaged paintings which reflect his highly personalised approach to language. When Krisanamis moved from Thailand to America over a decade ago he taught himself English by reading the daily newspaper, crossing out all the words he knew with a pencil. As his knowledge of English improved so this disciplined and obsessive procedure would reveal a field of black from which only the odd unknown word would stand out. This created a patterned page that became the substructure for painting and collage combinations. In his later works, traditional art materials share pictorial space with tactile ready-mades, bits and pieces from coloured out newspapers, laundry receipts, cellophane, noodles and tea, glued in, enmeshed and stuck on. In his new works Krisanamis has restricted himself to a predominantly monochrome palette with thousands of noodles built into vertical and horizontal drifts of white across a black canvas.