Between.....: By Takol Khao sa-ad

Sayan Daengklom

To perceive the violence is to see. One normally values and interprets the violence from what appears to eyes without suspecting that it might be just a part of the whole – an incomplete truth. We often perceive the violence as an indirect experience through media. Photography is a result of a selection and estimation of the incident, therefore, we perceive what has been selected, documented and passed on by the others. In this exhibition, Thakon Khaosa-ad made his violent paintings by using photographs from different media, such as newspapers, magazines and television, as a prototype. As he used photographs which were taken by others, the violence in his works is a secondary violence: from an actual violence to an image of violence in the media, and from an image of violence in the media to a painting. 

 

People believe that photographs can represent the truth objectively and completely because they are a document of “something that had been there before”. They refer to people, objects and incidents which exist during the time when the photographs were taken. Photographs catches up to the moment. But what exists in photographs are selected truths kept inside the frame while the whole were outside and had already passed on. The distortion between the fact and the fragment of fact in the media exists also in paintings. Thakon’s realistic paintings are neither an imitation nor a reproduction of photographs. Painting doesn’t “reflect” anything straightforwardly but has its own world and story, like using the Photoshop program to edit an image on the computer, composing an element by a painter also makes a distortion in painting. Painting has its own story which is sometimes totally separate from the model. As the first one to see, it is the right of the painter to make an essence of his paintings.    

 

Thakon selected some images from the media which remind him of something personal or impress him in some way to be resources for his paintings. He cuts parts of an image, then enlarges it and then something will be added or deleted according to an image in his imagination. The feeling of “what it should be seen’ is decided by the painter himself and indicates that he is a master of his artworks.  The processes that don’t exist in an exhibition are an important part of his artistic practice, but we see only a result – the end, we don’t see an in between – the process itself. 

 

Most of the images that Thakon has collected are about violence. He didn’t present images of the violence itself but the moment before that violence happened. The American and Japanese hostages caught and killed by the Al Qaeda were presented in his paintings the same way as the Tsunami series. The American hostage with the gun barrel on the right corner, the Japanese hostages who were blindfolded and the big wave of the Tsunami are the last moments before the violence happened: before the execution in case of the hostages series and before being flooded under the Tsunami in case of the Tsunami series (this image came from the last shot in the digital camera which had been discovered later by the rescue team, the shooter had passed away). Through the paintings, we are looking at the last moment of somebody’s life.    
 
The violence outside the frames is more terrible because Thakon’s paintings suggest it without telling the whole story. It automatically makes us think that it is too violent to allow anyone to see. The ambiguous provoke our imagination to the violence which we actually don’t see in reality. Therefore, “between” is the keyword in appreciating Thakon’s works, what we don’t see clearly is more attractive. The painter controls our perceptions and we easily fall down into his trap without any questions.  At the end, it is our own imaginations that make the violence for incidents that we are suggested and / or forced to see only some parts of it. Rather than what actually confronts our eyes, the hidden side in our minds is the real origin of the haunting…