Untitled, 1997, is a prominent example of Udomsak Krisanamis’s unique visual language. Minute circles of varying sizes and shades of yellow peek through a jet-black foreground. The resulting polka dot composition, typical of the artists’ work at the time, is often likened to physical phenomenon like stars in the sky or a cityscape at night.
However, representational analyses of Krisanamis’s work are secondary to the conceptual framework of the artist’s oeuvre. To construct these paintings, Krisanamis adopts the same approach he employed to learn English. Upon arriving to the United States, he would study newspapers, crossing out words he already understood. Eventually, as his grasp of the language grew, he began to color much larger areas of the pages.
To create works like the present lot, Krisanamis would find strips of newspaper and color them completely black aside from the negative space within characters like O, P, 0 and 9. He would then layer these strips on top of one another, creating a labyrinth of linear groups of dots with a nest-like compositional density.
“There's a hobbyist's obsessiveness here, a superfluity of attention, that usually seems reserved for activities beyond the pale of the aesthetic… At the same time, though, another kind of awe is invoked: imagined scenes of the mind-numbingly precise work involved in an almost pathological process. The compound feeling is an odd, off-putting reverence, a skewed Sublime.”
—Steven Stern
An emphasis on process defines both the conceptual and physical construction of Krisanamis’s works. The labor-intensive procedure of creating the works reflects the artist’s arduous journey teaching himself a new language on both a theoretical and practical level. Works like the present lot exhibit the compulsive nature of Krisanamis’s early visual language, offering viewers a glimpse of the uniquely contradictory scale he works in–simultaneously near-microscopic and impossibly vast, yet deeply personal.