Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy

TransPollock #3 [red shift, blue shift] is a version of an installation first created for the solo exhibition The Nerve That Eats Itself at Bangkok’s Gallery VER in 2018. The work is a result of a number of years of experimentation and development that addressed the artist’s interest in sculptural processes that can meld surface and depth. Formally, Curtin explores the perception of scale, as TransPollock #3 continues to oscillate between suggestions of microscopic views and strangely detailed landscapes, providing audiences with a sense of being large or small. Symbolically, however, the visceral, web-like, skeletal and bristling rendering points to networks, human cells, neurons, and also perhaps the minutiae of underwater worlds. 

The artist studied ideas of dark matter, the hypothetical existence of the inverse of stars and galaxies: astronomical material that does not emit light. He is also interested in the encoded and experiential aspects of American abstract expressionism and colour-field painting such as Jackson Pollock and Kenneth Noland. But Curtin offers a wry response to the famed Pollock's ejaculatory and expansive surfaces, instead exploring an intimacy that subverts any implication of the old master’s powerful, masculine, posturing. TransPollock #3 [red shift, blue shift] rather recalls the immersive experience of a Rothko as well as Noland because of the play of color between closeness and distance.

TransPollock #3 essentially take a sense of energy as the work itself. A sense of energy emphasized by the rigidity of the grid structure. Previous formal distinctions in the artist’s practice have now disappeared: representation is abstraction, interior is exterior, surface is depth and perception is experience. The works don’t contain as all seems to move. And our capacity for detachment and deliberation is profoundly reduced as the sculptures bristle and provoke sensation. But what is this energy? How can we describe the sensations provoked? Sensation, the cultural theorist Sara Ahmed has written, is surface and spatial. It emerges from contact and orients and disorientates-producing an immediacy of physical experience and a sudden awareness of being in the world or temporarily suspended from it. And sensation is emotion; and emotion is bodily. Emotions push against description. They are unruly.

Written by Brian Curtin  (an art critic based in Bangkok)