(A+ Works of Art) Pool in the Garden, 2023

Apichaya Wannakit

Apichaya Wannakit’s paintings reach into the memories of her childhood in Ubon, Thailand: a marble chair in front of her home, pet dogs each pictured in the kind of everyday, charming activity that endears us to them. There is a quiet serenity to the way she resuscitates these figures and landscapes of her past, a sentimentality controlled and deliberate. Unexpected softness emerges from cartoonish depictions, a result of pale washes of oil paint infused with the palette of the earliest and latest hours of the day. The abstracted experience of gazing back is what guides her aesthetic; to Wannakit, these qualities—that could be considered naive—pay honest attention to the ways in which these memories return to her mind through sepia-toned lenses. Never precise (like the dog that hides under the legs of a stool, depicted only in silhouette) and always tinged with an imaginary bend. These paintings tell us of a kind of vision that is intensely personal, sometimes unreachable even to the figure who stretches herself back into the recesses of her childhood gaze.

Artwork Information

Year
2023
Media
Oil and gouache on canvas
Dimension (cm)
86 x 58

Exhibition Information