"James Prapaithong’s paintings are concerned with how we see, not what we see. At least that’s the impression one gets from works such as Quietly Falling (all paintings 2024), a large blue-black rectangle that freezes a thousand twinkling tricks of the light: a complex ballet of shadows, reflections and wave patterns. It appears to explore what happens when low late afternoon sunlight, after bouncing off rippling water, enters the retina. Hanging next to it, The Night We Met is a fuzzier, soft-focus depiction of what seem to be clouds of smoke pinpricking a night sky, as a lone firework in the top-right releases a spherical ball of orange tracers. Prapaithong again seems more interested in the human visual system’s optical quirks than his indistinct subject matter. Is he trying to mimic the fallible vision of a roving eye midway through a saccadic movement, darting away from the action towards a new focal point? Or perhaps the events unfolding are so scattered, chaotic, fast and ephemeral that the mind struggles to process them into a coherent whole, or picture?
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James Prapaithong