Eastern concepts meld with Western painting methods in Thai artist Kamol Tassananchalee‘s mystical abstractions currently on view at LA Artcore. This transnational painter, who maintains a studio in Chatsworth, received his MFA from Otis in 1977, was titled National Artist of Thailand in 1997, and represented his motherland in the 2015 Venice Biennale. His most original works in this exhibition are from “The Four Element” series inspired by the Buddhist principles of earth, air, fire and water as the four elemental constituents of existence. In this series, calligraphically fluid brushstrokes loosely swish and swirl over distinctively shaped wooden boards and swaths of unstretched canvas, intermittently coalescing into eccentric arcs and mysterious orbs. Tassananchalee’s abstract forms sometimes seem tenuously anthropomorphic, evoking lips, eyes, tongues, and primordial human figures. Anthropomorphism is corroborated by the fact that his wooden surfaces were originally screens for nang yai, a Thai tradition of shadow puppetry. The show also features “Under the Western Sky,” a watercolor series that Tassananchalee, an honorary artist in permanent residence of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, painted en plein air while escorting fellow Thai artists around Southwestern desert countryside. Depicting cows and horses running in roads and gulches, these romantic landscapes testify to the enduring international fascination with the American West.

LA Artcore Union Center for the Arts
120 Judge John Aiso St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs through May 27