Natee Utarit: Déjà vu

For his exhibition in Naples, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, the Thai artist shows a possible dialogue between East and West.  

The meeting of the Doriforo and Buddha, which gives the project its title, is not only the result of the suggestion of Utarit, who found in the first similarities with the traditional Cambodian and Thai representations of the walking Buddha, but it is the expression of a reflection by the artist that suggests us more deeply that the art, history and culture of a people are never 'pure' but always and inevitably hybridized, open, crossed.
The entire cloister, where the exhibition is set, thus becomes a place of meditation and the other works are gathered around the two central figures. The passage of the Buddha is underlined by two mosaics in the Pompeian style, entitled Buddha is here, where his footprints are depicted, in the centre of which there is a Dharmacakra, the Dharma Wheel, also hybridized by classical culture, where the eight rays are replaced by eight ionic columns. In the continuous play of references between East and West and between past and present that characterizes the entire work, there is the large triptych Reclining Buddha with Volcano where the golden Buddha is lying down, with reference to the iconography of Thai temples, under a porch in a Renaissance square, which is in turn a quotation of the famous painting of the Ideal City (1477), in the version preserved at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, on whose background, however, stands Vesuvius.
The leap from the classical world to urban street art is rapid with the polyptych House of Buddha: 6 large canvases on which, in Italian and English, are reported, in the style of urban writing in gray on gray background, verses taken from the Dhammapada, a Buddhist canon that is believed to collect the words spoken by Gautama Buddha. On the canvas there is also an embroidery, which reproduces the Academy of Naples then the National Archaeological Museum, taken from a small eighteenth-century etching included in a tourist guide of 1758.

Artist:
Natee Utarit
Title:
Déjà vu
Curated by:
Demetrio Paparoni
Where:
Fondazione Made in Cloister, piazza Enrico De Nicola, 46 – Napoli
Until:
4 gennaio 2020

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