Bangkok
Thakon Khao sa-ad: Between
Gallery Ver

The perpetual-motion media-induced collision of the everyday and the extraordinary is the unifying premise behind Thakon Khao sa-ad’s recent series of paintings, five of which were shown recently at Bangkok’s newly-established Gallery Ver (SEE AAP 51). Thakon’s realist work recalls the photo-derived painting of Gerhard Richter, who decades ago suggested that the close, even symbiotic co-existence of disturbing and mundane imagery – the two meeting in consciousness where mind-numbing repetition registers like low frequency static – characterizes visual culture the world over.

Nevertheless, Thakon’s take on this genre constitutes a thoroughly au courant reconsideration of the cerebral ecology of today’s media. Clipping photos from daily newspapers or other mass circulation sources, and adapting them by enlarging, cropping or otherwise simplifying his subjects, Thakon arrives at a kind of doubly-stilled simulacrum, regardless of whether he pulls from the front page or the fashion section.

In Realistic Girl (2006), a portrait derived from a cyber “chatbot” character seems doubly synthetic, to the extent that the canvas itself is a queer hybrid of female “right stuff” as promoted variously by Japanese anime and manga, children’s dolls and drag queens. In Still (2006), a pristine tropical marine view turns out to be a generic sampling of seascape just prior to the devastation caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In yet another instance, Judgement (2004), a distressingly familiar image of bound hostages surrounded by anonymous, gun-wielding captors is rendered in a series of sanguine, abbreviated brushstrokes, reminiscent of early Impressionism.

Ultimately, if we no longer trust photography’s verity, having long ago accepted that the medium’s parameters implicitly add up to one more kind of abstraction, Thakon’s work signals a similar loss of faith in discovering anything tangible beyond the materiality of painting itself. It is an apt metaphor for the postmodern visual experience as one of periodic automatic regress into emotional and cognitive standby: We are all on screensaver. Thakon’s smartly painted mediations suggest that we live in an age in which the very notion of arriving at an infallible, “eyewitness” account of the true or the real is, at best, and expedient delusion. Like an addict of random violence seeking emotional release from pulling a trigger, we feverishly fire our gaze upon so many pockets of reality, if only to inhale the smoke of our own retinal impressions.

- Gregory Galligan