Ames Yavuz is pleased to present Call Me By My Name, a solo presentation by Thai artist Channatip Chanvipava.
Using the materiality of paint to navigate the past, Chanvipava draws from a vibrant visual vocabulary, developed from both conscious and unconscious memories. Without using preliminary sketches, the artist makes intuitive compositions from fragments of recollections, mentally incubated and expressed with gestural immediacy, creating honest and revealing reflections of his own psyche.
Set in familiar everyday spaces like airports, living rooms and highways, Chanvipava’s works evoke their unexpectedly charged nature. In his work, the mundane is imbued with the subjectivity of memory and emotion. The microcosm of Chanvipava’s lived experiences and attachments are melded with the macrocosm of universal experience, steeping the works in something intimate yet relatable. The artist calls this an “analytic approach”, using the micro elements of the personal to express “shared themes and concepts that resonate with a collective experience, on a “macro” level”.
The physical act of painting, in which thought moves through the body–hand to brush, brush to surface–shapes Chanvipava’s exuberant vision of a hopeful present and future. These gestures are preserved in thick layers of paint, forming highly textured works.
Alongside the large works, Chanvipava’s smaller “memory box” works in this presentation allow for a deeper focus on movement. At this scale, figuration yields to abstraction, and the brushwork becomes more contained — nurturing distilled emotions that punctuate the presentation.
In the otherwise ambiguous works, the titles are the singular thematic clue offered. Aptly, Call Me By My Name addresses topics of identity and recognition. Often exploring the complexities of selfhood and performance in his practice, this presentation draws from Chanvipava’s experiences as a Thai artist of Chinese descent living in England, connecting him to broader conversations on diasporic life at large. Amid pressures to assimilate or perform one’s identity, Chanvipava reclaims the complexities of his identity through his vibrant, eye-catching, almost sculptural paintings. Call Me By My Name is an invocation, and a desire for his real self to be named and simply be.