James Prapaithong: Light Years

About

Workplace is delighted to present Light Years, a solo exhibition of new works by James Prapaithong. The exhibition explores Prapaithong’s investigation into light and time, and the potential of the artwork to invoke and activate latent emotion and memory.

Through a technique of painstakingly working small quantities of pigment deeply into the weave of raw canvas Prapaithong gradually builds hazy, deeply saturated, high contrast paintings that monumentalise fleeting moments captured by the artist on short informal videos. Always shot outside, or through a window looking out, Prapaithong’s scenes are stripped of specificity, temporality and figuration. Light is the subject and protagonist in Prapaithong’s work, its reflected dance on water seen through the branches of a tree, or its intense solar glare bending light around a silhouetted tree trunk is at once mundane and magical.

In his classic novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust describes the experience of recall, triggered by the taste of the crumbs of a Madeleine cake in a cup of tea:

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.[…] And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea”

Like Proust’s Madeleine cake, Prapaithong’s isolated moments become punctums into profound memories. In Prapaithong’s work universal and shared contemplative moments are evoked through the soft, blurred assertions of his imagery. The primordial effect of light interacting with a surface conjures in us the recall of our own past experience of those rare moments where the presence of the world has cut through and interrupted our incessant inner narrative. In this way Prapaithong’s works are both immediate and transcendent, gently coaxing to the sublime as the transient and the infinite are held at once.

James Prapaithong (b.1996, Bangkok, Thailand) live and works between London and Bangkok. He received his BA in painting from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2019 and his MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions include A New Sensation, Gallerie Marguo, Paris, France; A Year Ago Today, Workplace, London; Still@live, MAPA Fine Art London; To My Twenties, Old Central St. Martins Building, London; The Weird and the Eerie, Hockney Gallery, London; and HEXAGON, Nova Contemporary, Bangkok, Thailand.