Gallery VER

By Thaiwijit Puengkasemsomboon
Curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija
Venue: Gallery VER & Artist+Run
Date: 18th January – 14th March, 2020
Opening Reception: 18th January 2020, 6pm onward

Known to most of us in the circle of Thai Art, Pee Mor is well known and well received for his long and illustrious career as a painter of what could be described as a form of naive abstraction, a resolution of bold and bright gestures, which rejects the rigidity of traditions. Here, and now, we are able to reconsider the shadows of Pee Mor’s practice, under his rhizomatic networks of dystopic enthropy, a morphology of objects and signs. To say “ naive “, would be an underestimation of primal expressions, since the artist is a subject of self-reflection and critical- consciousness, using the form of naïveté as a critical opposition to the highly skilled, highly trained and professionalized academia of traditions, popularly visible. In his practice, making art isn’t a skill, but rather seeing and thinking is, art. That creativity is not a skill but a practice, the artist gives attention to the detritus of life, and in that life the artist recuperates and resuscitates, the utterances of the forgotten. Scraps and fragments, are given wholeness, voids and ovoids given place in the universe, where we stand becomes a part of all things we have created and consumed. We as human are responsible for the anthropocene, and in that world we need to address what we neglect as useless, as junk, as waste, as negligible or even naive. In his on going attempts to grapple with these excess, Pee Mor has in his own way, resisted to letting go, of the responsibility we have towards our own destruction, and instead he has naively, been reinventing the language and given us a new life in a place we didn’t think we could be living in. For that I like to thank him deeply for the opportunity to bring forward what has always been his shadow of practice, and in this light, I would hope we all learn something new and useful.

Excerpt from text by rirkrit tiravanija