http://www.mfoldgallery.com
Mountain Fold is pleased to announce the opening of "Garden," a show of
paintings, installation, and sculpture by Korakrit Arunanondchai. Arunanodchai's
work plays with everything and its opposite: he makes abstracted derivatives of
Hieronymous Bosch paintings, and hyperreal integrals of his own pieces, creating
a visual calculus, a study of change, limits, and
infinity.
Arunanondchai invites the viewer into a heavenly earth, that extends in one
direction towards an imagined hell, and in the other towards a heaven. Yet these
visual spaces are at once inviting and forboding: the light-seeping wooden prism
on the ground suggests a point of emergence into living and a sealing off of
death; or perhaps is could be a portal into Second Life, a way towards a digital
reality that can be both idyllic and nightmarish. Hanging above this is a
sculpture, whose elements allude to a life-cycle narrative, Judeo-Christian and
Buddhist foundation stories, and human fears. Opposite is "The Garden of Earthly
Delights," an 8x8 foot silk-screened painting, which borrows the structure from
the renaissance original, but leaves behind its allegory and
figuration.
Arunanondchai weaves such icons as the snake, the cross, and the jewel
throughout his art: they are items readymade in meaning, connoting a million
disparate things in different contexts. This art asks, in this moment, what does
the transmigrated symbol mean? The artist transforms not only the symbol and
Bosch's art, but also his own pieces, creating more and more abstracted
iterations of them until they can exists only as solitary objects, installed in
a fantasy gallery in a digital
world.
"Garden" presents fantasy spaces where the the heavenly and the hellish, the
alive and the dead, the serious and the joke, all contend with one another. Yet
beneath the dynamic conceptual dichotomies are beautifully compelling and
mysterious visual
objects.