Natee Utarit
The Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
At The Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Natee Utarit’s most successful paintings to date were accompanied by some of the weightiest texts I’ve read in a Bangkok gallery. The writers Surakand Toesomboon and Mukhom Wongthes heightened the critical implications of Utarit’s sharp renderings of signs and symbols related to Thai politics, history and nationalism. Otherwise, the unified plane of the quasi-photorealist and often monochrome paintings were a welcome shift from the artist’s previous method of layering disparate images in an artsy and conventional manner; subtlety of consideration has replaced clunky projections of cultural difference.
Utarit has discovered that he doesn’t need to guide the viewer too pedantically – or else he now understands that this may be the job of art writers. Toesomboon is there to point out the implications of an image of the public statue of King Rama V divorced from its surroundings, manipulated to appear cold and weightless against a flat black background. No longer soliciting the reverence otherwise afforded this central Bangkok monument to modernity, it instead becomes an icon for contemporary considerations of the ramifications of Rama V’s purportedly progressive vision. Likewise, by altering the colour and the framing of the Thai flag, the exhibition throws questions of its significance into relief.
Utarit’s isolation and deconstruction of particular signs is hardly a new (or even interesting) project. However, to dismiss him on these grounds is to miss the ongoing importance of a reflexive view of images and their ideological functions for a country like Thailand. Here the cultural power of visual representation – the blind faith it can serve – is far from jaded.
Anyway, Utarit is not entirely dependent on strict stylistic and conceptual precedents. His series ‘Micro History of Politic’ (2007) moves away from single signs to collections of kitschy ornamental animals that appear to be marching or waiting, lightened by a sense of humour comparatively absent from the work that addresses specifically Thai imagery. The sense of form and space in these paintings suggests an appropriate metaphor for the artist’s concerns as a whole. As Utarit patently didn’t render the toy animals from observation but nevertheless employs an expert use of light and shadow, the paintings’ illusion of solid form and realistic spatial relationships only works from a distance; on close examination, weight and depth dissipates. The image is revealed as just that, an illusion.
Brian Curtin
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