Be Takerng Pattanopas
Catherine Schubert Fine Art, Bangkok, Thailand
Be Takerng Pattanopas’s first solo exhibition in his native city seems like an anomaly when placed alongside the work of his contemporaries. The artist’s large, weighty and labour-intensive sculptures stand apart from the quirky, pop cultural and usually time-based works so favoured by local galleries and the art press. Yuree Kensaku’s appropriation of household objects in terms of manga-inspired surrealism is a case in point, or Navin Rawanchaikul’s embracing of Bollywood vulgarity with his billboard-sized paintings. while Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook recently filmed Thai farmers discussing examples of 19th-century French painting (‘Why is she naked?’, one asks of a Manet). Pattanopas’s concerns – questions of revelation and truth, of physical impermanence and contingency versus the universal – consciously move towards the profound end of the spectrum, pervading his monolithic encasements of (what appears to be) human flesh and tissue. The works demand careful deliberation to the extent that deliberation becomes the point.
A series of photographs of earlier installations signal the artist’s interest in aspects of Buddhist iconography and thought. Relief sculptures of kouroi-like figures are lit to suggest a ghostly presence due to shifting perceptions of mass and space. These works have a devotional quality and refer to statues of Buddha in Thai temples, where gilded bronze is lit to appear weightless in order to address matters of impermanence and transcendence. Pattanopas’s current concern with the interior of the human body is a radical shift but he retains an interest in the illusion of corporeality and aims for contemplative rather than sensational effects. Three wall-mounted cases of rusted steel (naut-i, 2008) have apertures through which one can glimpse seemingly endless tunnels of fleshy ‘stuff’. But while the red-and-yellow naut-i 1 and naut-i 3 might suggest the journey of an endoscope, nauti-2 is a cool blue-and-white interior landscape. These works refer to the idea of journeying outwards (to metaphorically journey inwards), the punning of ‘not I’, as well as the Pali term ‘anatta’, meaning selflessness. Sustained engagement with the works’ interiors reveals Pattanopas’s manipulation of silicone and painted wire mesh, but the infinite tunnels’ enigmatic association nevertheless remain compelling.
In a demanding essay that accompanies the exhibition, also titled ‘Interior Horizons’, Lawrence Chua writes that Pattanopas’s sculptures ‘remind us of the uncanny spaces that we inhabit in the global capitalist economy’. There is certainly a suggestion of how the human body may both register and resist objectification in the works; at their most powerful, however, they also resist contexts that would otherwise fix interpretation.
Brian Curtin
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