Nova Contemporary is pleased to present Supawich Weesapen's first-ever solo exhibition, The Comet and The Nostalgic Souls. On display from February 18th to April 8th 2023, this radiant exhibition renders the rare emergence of a green comet, delving into its world of digital sublimity. The artist presents a new body of work that transcends the boundaries of painting, illuminating the gallery with glowing imagery. Heavily inspired by the astronomical, Weesapen completed this series of works in the beginning of 2023, when a precious jewel comet came unusually close to Earth for the first time in 50,000 years. This stroke of seemingly cosmic fate is palpable throughout the exhibition, completely transporting the viewer to an otherworldly dimension.
Weesapen evokes a process that he terms metaphoring, producing images beyond mundane language and understanding. These new works analogize a romance between past and present, exuding feelings of anemoia, referring to the ineffable experience of missing a time that one has never known. Weesapen’s paintings do not simply depict the feelings of nostalgia, instead acting as vehicles for entering its abstract effects.
While emerging with supernatural enigma, these paintings remain intensely current. In his incandescent works, the artist emulates the backlit illumination of digital screens and employs their red-green-blue (RGB) palettes. The Stump of the System, one of his largest works to date, features a light source that appears near spiritual, grasping towards the hazy opening of the comet, and blending the spiritual and scientific through feathered edges and fugitive forms. In Comet Fang, somber shades contrast with brilliant whites, propelling the viewer into vivid suspense.
Weesapen maximizes the gallery’s environment, transforming its glass surfaces and pockets of natural light into beacons of expression. Creating intricate systems of meaning, he echoes, reverses, and mirrors text and imagery to form mirages, hidden meanings, and palindromes. Fleeting yet meditative, the works form timeless continuums, acting as deposits of impalpable emotion and memory.
The exhibition is accompanied by an artist book and a text written by Roger Nelson.
