Never Lonely Alone: The Painted Memories of Jiab Prachakul
Sweet Solitude at The Austin Contemporary
The internet, or, its more sinister colloquial term, the web, exists as a ubiquitous resource for knowledge as well as a space without physicality, ethereal yet undoubtedly real, proven so by its necessity in our global communications, maybe even so far as our everyday functions. Send a text. If it sends blue, congrats, that’s the internet. Swipe a card using your phone. Data through the wireless cellular slipstreams. Again, ubiquitous. At its worst–and this may be its primary function–underneath it all, the many users generating endless data, makes an invisible landfill all their own, and that’s the trick, that’s the web. It’s all so deeply alone. Jiab Prachakul’s exhibit, Sweet Solitude, at the Austin Contemporary, was revealed to me through this electronic reality, by happenstance, by this lonely informational infrastructure, and, in what I’d consider rather crude terms, through a front page Google algorithmic recommendation, a quick glance before opening a new tab, something purely virtual–a dirty feeling…
Jiab Prachakul studies her own ennui through her recent curated works, her own loneliness through her reflective imagery and handiwork in the context of a globally interested art scene. Flipping through the pamphlet given upon arrival to the exhibit, Jiab tells stories, gives descriptions of each work, elaborates her memories and stories as one would in a diary. Her thoughts flow on the page, giving illuminations into the pieces at hand. I stood and glossed through the pages. She, a self taught painter from Thailand, now residing in France, a contemporary and appreciator of other southeast Asian creatives, be it arthouse filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or acclaimed poet and now novelist Ocean Vuong, portraits of them she’s lovingly crafted, amongst others, demonstrates a wide influence, honed in subtle grace with her manner of portraiture and landscape painting.
The first floor gallery at the Austin Contemporary presents her works–the space humble, small, intimate–matter of fact, white walls, canvases hung as to give each proper attention, organized with portraits in the first rooms into gradual landscapes at the back nook, a pleasant walk that invites the viewer to loop around once or twice, a geometric space that had me curving around, exploring different aspects every lap, a snail’s pace racetrack of examination.
In the main gallery room, the center conjoining area, most spacious, portraits surround the patron, two wooden stools for rest and study in the middle, all else is bare. A piece titled Jeonga (In Nia’s Eyes), (2023), calls. In this work, as mentioned by Jiabs accompanying text, a friend of hers sits, confidently, proud of her life and full of stature. Her sharp bleached bob hangs in locks contrasting her black high fashion drapage that adorns her. Striking, but what hypnotizes me is the brushwork of the floors, how each symmetrical hardwood slat is made real. Jiab, through the variable length of a wide brush, uses paint to recreate the warbled winding lines of wood, the patterns left by their gradual growth and eventual cutting and treatment. The brush dictates the material. The paint becomes the wood. It’s simple. Geniusly simple.
As I went about my third loop of the central room I discovered more of this hidden genius. In Last Summer (2024), another work depicting her friend Jeonga. The tallest in the gallery, overtaking and looming, her same friend now stands, black umbrella in hand, central, looking out through a tall paneled window, into the rain. Amongst all of the details in the painting, the hard lines of paint are seen as shadows in the coat, the odd blotches of unexpected hues as reflections in the potted plant. What jumps out as unique, once noticed, is the simplicity of the sporadic rhythm in the vertical lines outside the window: the white lines of rain, their motion and their freeze captured in one concept, the decision, as the painter, to depict the static image of a moment while also giving movement to the rain in these long, neat, lines. Another genius.
Lastly, a cinematic influence creeps into the next of these paintings, Girlfriends (2022), depicts Jiab in white, and Jeonga in black kneeling near a vast body of water, lighthouse in the distance, wine glasses emptied. A boat peeking from the leftmost edge of the canvas. I imagine them talking, perhaps a pause in the conversation, or a quiet appreciation that true friends can take as intimate pondering and not awkward miscalculation of speech. The viewer seems to take in this snapshot as through a lens, on the left, overexposed are lights reflected as yellow blotches, just as how a stylistic, or amateur, photographer would take it all in, shimmering but still. The shadows of our two main figures are oddly yellow, suggesting that shadows don’t always produce a clean shade. Shadow is not a color. It’s a lack of direct light upon a surface, and many imperfections can happen while taking a picture… The yellow hints at this perceptual difficulty, one that’s sidestepped and made whimsical in Jiab’s envisioning. Through these clever techniques, I was interested, but I had yet deciphered the deeper intrigue into her works.
At the entrance of the gallery, chosen as the title of the exhibit itself, was Sweet Solitude (2024). I stood wondering what made this so, this Sweet Solitude. It was painted with acrylic on linen, the materials used amongst all other works displayed. On the canvas is a subversion of the portrait, Jiab herself, back turned, walking down a dirt road–alone. A scorched blue sky looms above, similar to ones on hundred degree summer days in Texas. The baby blue screams instead of lulls–drones–so hot the clouds have fled. Jiab walks in this expanse of road and sky, evoking Edward Hopper’s subjects in their empty ruminations, as foliage and shrubbery decorate the depicted path. The image seems to beg the viewer to seek for her thoughts, imagine them as one’s own, the ways they overlap and veer away, the ways they can or can’t grasp on to anything.
At this work I knew she was a talent, but I hadn’t been able to piece why. The compositions were affecting, the technique, paint application and the like, the style at hand. Was it cartoonish, not truly, and that seems so rude to say? Was it printlike, as in printmaking, reminiscent of woodblock techniques from centuries past, not entirely? Have I relegated her to some diaspora distinction with the last association? I’d hoped not. I was unsure. There was a puzzle here. I carried on.
Beyond the room, into the next, rightward past the corner, was the next work that caught my eye: with the lengthy title Lonesome Traveler (After a scene from Eric Rohmer’s film A Summer’s Tale) (2022). It hung there, the canvas wide, large and wide, as to emulate the aspect ratio of said film. A man sits in the scene, crossed arms in a cafe, behind him a reflection of his seated self, tea pushed away on the small wooden table–alone. The right side of the picture details the space, the cafe, the furthest right border hinting at another table, another conversation, him excluded, or maybe self dejected. He is alone. The man is truly alone.
According to Jiab, in the pamphlet, she’d seen this image from Rohmer’s film back in 2008 in London. She deeply felt the isolation of the man, in a French cafe. The composition of the shot had lingered with her, and she felt alone then. It stuck with her. As time went on, as her life progressed, she moved to France, where she lives now. In these similar French cafes, in her now home, she remembered this isolation, but it transformed into alienation. Being Thai–her skin is a given. She feels alien in France. She has a friend from Berlin, a Japanese friend by the name of Makoto, who agrees to pose at the very diner where the original shot of the film was made, and thus the painting was born.
Upon further reflection, a deeper pain is revealed in these paintings, more than the existential strolling of the prior work, and far beyond the surface level beauty of the visual flourishes in the ones before. An angst of identity is depicted, an outsiderness that can’t be shaken. Her feelings, her experience of a world where she can never quite fit. At this moment I knew what this affecting essence of the work was beyond the brushstrokes and the technicalities. She wants to capture people for what they are and when they are, as if an impression through the memory in paint can highlight contours, the rose-tinted beauty and vignetting of a loving instant, blown up to wall-sized proportions, can make one’s own perspective true, universal–less lonely alone. I moved on.
The last room, the smallest, packed into the corner of the building with the red neon lit ‘Exit’ door shoved to the side, was the landscapes room. The works were darker in color palette and steeped in further abstraction. A single bench placed in the middle–perfect–for it was about time for me to sit and look over my notes. In my frantic phone tapping, my mess of a note document, I had not given full notice to the paintings around me.
After some recollecting and organization of thought, I looked up. Before me was Music of Silence (Diptych) (2024), two enormous canvases, paired to give the wall an entire view into another realm. Jiab walks through a favorite trail of hers in Vienne, France with her husband Guillame. They stroll, small, in the bottom left of the leftmost canvas, leaving an entire open expanse for the augmented, dripping, radiant, scenery. This piece begins her development of prior abstract details into the magical realist, psychedelic depictions of memory. Trees glow coral, ribbed and alien, glow and somehow sway, like underwater life adapted for sub-solar environments. Reflections in the river beside them resemble undulating organisms more than flora. Specks of light dash the image, some smudge, some pointillist in their arrangement. Trees on the right canvas transform into cerebral folds, violet and impossible. But in the eyes of Jiab, this was her everyday walk with Guillame, this is her commemoration of a ceremony she’s now since had to leave by moving from her home. In this vibrant heightened state–one that the mind can so easily conjure–her walk can exist as uniquely her own, as well as ours to imagine. The intensity could not be contained and required a diptych of epic proportion, maximally luminous, inarguable.
Turning around, opposite to this muralistic piece, was one much smaller, in scope and in approach. I was haunted. I felt seen. It was as if I was looking into a mirror housing my own memories. Past loves. Past friends. Family. Skipping around throwing rocks. Looking into pools. Sandstone, shale, odd shells and scampering insects. Chirping as the sun goes down. Birdsong, flutter, and kneeling down to find a feather. Keeping it. Bike paths drawing in the dirt their successful passages as the others fade away. Bent trees notched with commemorations of honeymoon phases and initials etched in hearts. Coins laying in the water’s deep collecting algae as a wish struggles to come true. Howdys and Hellos as passersby. I blinked. I’ve been there, I thought. I’ve most definitely been there. This peeking through the trees and waterhole of green suggestion. These forms that look nearly stenciled, minimal, its striking nature, the staging of the image and its complementary colors. I looked at the label adjacent. It read, Barton Creek, 2024.
In those moments I reflect about the connections one can make with art, how we are all so very different, but even in this difference, we can see and feel the same thing, or at least that’s the hope. In pieces such as Barton Creek, that hope is given cupped hands and an ounce of breath for that little fire, however little it is. I’ve heard that artists are artists because they are lonely people. Hell, I’ve heard that writers are writers only because there was nothing else they could do. I’m not entirely sure, but the sentiment resonates during lonelier times. In Priab’s exhibit, this Sweet Solitude, I see a triumph of this loneliness, an ability to sublimate this alienation into images that linger for the artist themselves, as greater than their reality, or transforming the reality into how truly impactful those moments were. As I type this, on my laptop, my alienating device supreme, I am happy to know that her works can be stored as our own memories, and in our own ways, we can feel that aloneness together, or that togetherness–alone.
