Specializing in Thai & Asian Contemporary Art

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Perfection and Seduction in the City of Tokyo

SIX                                 PHOTOBANGKOK 2018
Perfection and Seduction in the City of Tokyo
 

Xaxier Comas’s series SIX subtly understands relationships between the world of photography and the world itself, but paradoxically. SIX seduces us with their sense of aesthetic perfection: symmetrical compositions, the classical grandness of the black and white and abstracted forms. The photographs appear not as entities to be deciphered but beheld as spellbinding. However, on studying the intricate and glittering forms we may note that while they point inwards to the very condition of photography itself – pure light and frames that separate and isolate – they also point outwards to structures and signs: architecture, cosmology and proxies of the qualities of nature. The paradox of the series is this sleight between the appearance of “pure” form and yet the sense and aura of so much else. And Comas seems to aim to distract from such through seduction, a willingness to captivate with the play of light. Here is where his photographs hint at malefice.[2] The potential loss of our interpretative faculty could only be controversial.

The title of this series, SIX announces perfection and also multiple routes of belief. A mathematically perfect number due to the harmonies of addition and multiplication with which one can arrive at this digit, it is also the smallest perfect number in this respect. God created man on the sixth day and as the supreme act of creation, and the sixth of the Ten Commandments forbids murder. Six is also the extra, special sense way beyond empiricism. Coma’s photographs were taken in elevators in Japan, the title initially prompted by the typical number of interior planes that this liminal space provides. But the images he shapes are ephemeral and suggest other orders and geometries. Fantastical, and exceedingly elegant.
   

 

Xavier Comas – SIX
July 4 - 29, 2018
H GALLERY BANGKOK