WRITESCAPE
Ink team project.
Trio exhibition: Hélène Le Chatelier, Kwanchai Lichaikul, Uten Mahamid.
Black ink on white paper drawings.
At YenakART Villa Bangkok 7 Oct - 17 Nov '17
As human beings, how do we manage to write our own story on top of the family or collective histories we carry? How do we make ourselves heard among others voices? How can we express ourselves without twisting and distorting our inner landscapes?
Three artists, from Thailand and France, met and found synergies through their common ascetic artistic expression and their preferred tool to make light emerge: the black ink drawing and painting. Through five different series exhibited in the immaculate white space of YenakArt Villa, they invent a new personal expression, not combining but going beyond writing and landscape drawings, escaping the opposition: Writescape. Like French philosopher Jacques Derrida did with archi-writing or archi-trace, the three artists transcend the Platonic confrontation between writing and speech.
==Hélène Le Chatelier==, is a French protean artist, graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’arts, Olivier de Serres, where she specialized in fresco painting, currently living and working in Singapore. Hélène questions all aspects of memory, the idea of time passing, and the the traces it leaves in our bodies and souls. Her Writing series involves the gesture of writing as a deployed energy to inscribe our own lifeline and find our own path. These illegible writings then become a representation of our life landscapes, a horizon line defining our existences. While her Internal Landscape portray our inner geography, the landscapes we walk along when we sink in our inner world. Beyond the visible surface appear hidden continents, lands, stretches of water, skies and cloudy formations we may or may not be aware of, like snapshots of our feelings and emotions in a constant process of transformation.
==Uten Mahamid==, a graduate from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University, is a Thai writer, painter and illustrator. He is living and working in Phayao, his hometown. The artist’s work is interrogating his own inner world and the idea of carrying personal internal landscapes. His series Dreamscape resounds and responds, without any prior conversation regarding their intention, to Helene Le Chatelier’s Internal Landscape. Despite their very different way of using ink technique, they arrive and converge at an intimate meeting point in their work, giving the impression of viewing two sides of the same coin. In Anatomy, the following series that he created, Uten Mahamid is reflecting his journey into himself during a time when health issues were his major concern, making him feel like his strong mind was trapped in a sick body, a deteriorated habitat. By using the trees of the leaves as printing molds, a sort of X-Ray from Mother Nature, he is writing down this journey into his own body.
==Kwanchai Lichaikul==, born in Uttaradit Thailand, lives and works in Bangkok. Kwanchai graduated from the Suphanbury College of Fine Arts and from the Faculty of Painting and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University. His drawings are characterized by the use of simple lines and tonal contrast, covering the canvas with details, inviting the viewers to carefully explore the intimacy of the drawing. That way he is telling a story, mostly in rural environments. In Globe, a new series of round black and white drawings of landscapes, he goes further beyond the linear perspective developed by the Italian Renaissance by using a new perspective, a bird eye view. He also reminds us of the cultural symbolism of birds; they are bridging the mundane and the spiritual life, contemplating our inner landscapes and our souls.
The three artists met during their artists’ residency at Thaillywood, in Chonburi Thailand, in 2016.
This black and white drawing exhibition, in which the theme of memory and introspection is paramount, is coinciding with the cremation ceremonies of HM King Rama IX, which will be held, accordingly to an announcement of the Thai government, during the month of October 2017. The exhibition pays tribute to the memory of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
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