An Issue of Orientation in the Paintings done in Thailand between 1998 - 2005

I would hope that the paintings have an interpretive as well as a more immediate visual sense. The latter is important in this instance through a tendency of the medium of painting towards surface, both as a conveyor of imagery and as a material quality.

In terms of the structure of the paintings, the cultural questions that they raise, and my personal involvement with them, the term ‘orientation’ provides a useful embracing link. The viewer may extrapolate at least three areas of interest in the paintings; formal, cultural and personal.

Formally, the paintings consist of and refer to surfaces, particularly the Thai temple wall, with its own sense of surface heightened by decay due to conditions of climate. The iconography of the paintings, a set of ‘commoner’ characters that typically inhabit the lower level of Thai fresco, are both additional referents to the above-stated formal/material allusion, and motifs that gesture to another of the ways in which the paintings can be read.

According to academic sources (K.I.Matics Introduction to the Thai Mural, 1992, White Lotus, Thailand) ‘commoners’, due to their lowly status, are allowed to do what they like in Buddhist scenes. The sense that my imagination invokes of circumstances either temporally behind or ahead of these characters, finds its contemporary equivalent in people alone or in small groups in Bangkok’s desultory parks. Other motifs in the paintings, such as bushes and benches, help construct the feeling, perhaps, of rendevous and assignation.

Such figures and contexts can be considered further as surrogate of my personal involvement. A motive that I would like the paintings to convey is a discreet sense of erotic intrigue. This is delivered, therefore, through what may be a contemporary slant on what is traditionally called allegory. The paradox is fascinating: to make explicit while maintaining the secret, and is often perhaps at the core of art that is generated by deep concerns.

The linkage of the formal, cultural and personal may concern an aspect of the paintings not of arrival but of getting there; in a word, process. As a metaphor for the personal, process concerns possibility, and all that that further suggests, not least uncertainty. This brings us closer still to the relevance of the term orientation.

If one looks at the paintings not as finished but as possibility, it may be possible to see vestiges of the paintings’ layers, gestures of paint and colour that may not appear to show allegiance to anything, a tension between the paintings’ realistic spatial logic and passages of abstraction, and a general oddness to the way things are done. This is the area of the paintings which one may consider automatic or, connected with the artist no less, but unconsciously. In this sense many people’s work may therefore concern orientation. But not everyone willfully moves to circumstances askance of their own culture to discover aspects in it, and assimilate aspects into it, of another’s.

In many regions of the world there are ex-patriots fashioning their stories on an intercultural level. Due to the negative memory of colonialist intention that this may endorse in the host, there may not be unconditional willingness to acknowledge such input as contributing to the respective culture’s development. Hence, orientation may now also appear to concern displacement.

However, an ever-increasing body of intercultural production is surely contributed by people who have immersed themselves in cultures whose character seems usefully to project back to them aspects of their own sentient human concern. I believe the work I have done while living in Thailand falls into this category.

Michael Croft

13.08.05