Udomsak Krisanamis, FREIBURG, at Kunstverein. By Mark Prince.
To a culture that perceives art as a globally accessible product, transmitted and received at the click of a mouse, the Thai artist Udomsak Krisanamis’s work might well seem solipsistically self-referential. His paintings record nothing so much as the labor of their making; he is a golfer, and his shows are rife with references to the sport; his films—brief loops shot on a cell phone—are modest autobiographical distillations of quotidian particularity. And yet, step back, and he is sketching—with characteristically dry humor—a critical commentary on the international shop window of postmodernism, its presumption to speak across all boundaries.
At Kunstverein Freiburg, a huge headline, painted directly on the wall in block capitals, proclaimed GLOBAL INVESTMENTS. It might have been an enlargement of one of the newspaper snippets Krisanamis glues to his collages. Was the line referring to the abstract paintings hanging below? The words came across loud and clear, although they were surrounded by suggestions of dissent. “SOOP SIP”—painted on the adjacent wall within a sky blue speech bubble—is a phonetic translation of a Thai gossip column logo, meaning “rumors,” although the tail of the bubble absurdly indicated the concrete floor as its source. So much for the voice of the mass media. The paintings—each 5 by 3¼ feet and dated 2011—are composed of loose bands of black acrylic almost entirely obscuring the brightly colored grounds. These forms might have been adapted from the headline fonts, converting their facile communication into a muting of expression. Inarticulacy is proffered as an alternative to the glib exchange of information. Destabilized and deconstructed by the surrounding works, GLOBAL INVESTMENTS read like words ranted in a language the speaker does not understand...