FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Natee’s garden grows in KL

Natee’s garden grows in KL

The Thai painter honestly tried his best not to care about sunflowers

Natee Utarit is posing a rhetorical question. “You can’t paint an angry flower, right?”
Perhaps it’s not rhetorical. His flowers look furious – some of them, anyway. Others look sad or happy – or defiantly independent and ready to fight for their floral rights.

Natee’s garden grows in KL

Natee Utarit is examining five classical genres in Wester art, most recently the stilllife, in the Kuala Lumpur exhibition “It would be Silly to be Jealous of a Flower”.  Photo/The Star

Nevertheless, the 47-year-old Bangkok-based artist, who has an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur at the moment, is adamant that plants lack consciousness, a soul or any other such quality that can be transferred to canvas or paper.
“So the consciousness I sense in a flower is really my own,” he says. “I imbue the flower with it and the feelings that arise are reflected back at me. Flowers do not have a spirit, so humans painting flowers is kind of like talking to ourselves.”
Natee talks to himself quite fetchingly, then. The withering sunflowers in “Devil’s Dancing” have a charming back-story, but not one exactly born of a loving relationship between flower and artist. 
“I have never liked sunflowers and never seen anything special about them,” he says. “But I bought some anyway one day because I didn’t like the other flowers at the market. The sunflowers were the ones I disliked the least.”

Natee’s garden grows in KL

A detail of “Devil’s Dancing”. Photo/The Star

Back in his studio, he ignored them while they stayed wrapped in newspaper for days. “And that’s how I learned that sunflowers are incredibly tough. They ignored me every bit as much as I ignored them. Even when the water in the vase completely evaporated, they showed no sign of distress at their impending death.”
Only when they started shedding petals and curling up in anguish did Utarit pay heed.
Sunflowers had never seemed “alive” to him before. They were more like plastic flowers simulating life. Their appearance is unsettling in their perfection, the contrast in colours too sharp, and they lack the fragility and delicacy he associates with flowers.
“As they began to wither, I became aware of them as living flowers. They began to communicate with me, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I began to communicate with them.”

Natee’s garden grows in KL

       The oil painting that gave the show its name was finished just this year. Photo/The Star

Natee’s exhibition “It would be Silly to be Jealous of a Flower” is his sixth solo show in the Malaysian capital. It features 30 still-life depictions of roses, lotuses, lilies, orchids and those poor sunflowers. This is the second phase of a project in which the artist plans to survey five genres of classical Western Art.
Last year he presented “Samlee & Co: The Absolutely Fabulous Show” at Art Stage Jakarta, a portrait study of Bangladeshi magician Samlee and his family.
“It would be Silly” moves on to the still-life and ruminates on how the genre is perceived both within the art world and outside. Natee will tackle landscapes next, followed by “genre painting” and historical painting.
“We have never really moved on from thinking of the still-life as something for amateurs and beginners, for art students. It’s like the first level and you’re expected to move on to greater things,” he says. 
“Still-life painting is also seen as an appropriate hobby for a dentist who paints on Sundays just to relax. If an artist specialises in still-life, the impression is he’ll never be a great artist.”
And floral still-lifes are widely seen as boring and bourgeois, Natee says.

Natee’s garden grows in KL

One of the six lotuses. Photo/The Star

But he’s always found warmth in flowers and considers painting them more challenging than portraits. We can connect with the feelings conveyed in a portrait much more easily, he notes.
“You can express and explain the emotions in the eyes and mouth, the overall characterisation of the portrait, but I doubt anyone can understand the feelings of flowers by looking at their pistils or stamens.”
But perhaps the frames in this show provide clues to the pictures. Natee’s still-lifes are as much frame as painting. On the green walls, the gilded and brown frames, many from 17th- and 18th-century France and Italy, serve as windows to an imagined world.
“The frame is an opening to the realm of illusion, where the audience can jump in and out at will,” he says.

Rose are in bloom

The exhibition “It would be Silly to be Jealous of a Flower” is at Richard Koh Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur until Thursday. 
Find out more at (03) 2095 3300 or www.RKFineArt.com.

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