Apiruk Punmoonsilp

Impressionist painting as it developed in late 19th-century France and, out of the audacity of Realism, was a shock to historical understandings of what painting is and what painting should do. The Impressionists abandoned conventional modes and sought an aesthetic of the everyday and the fleeting in terms of rendering moments captured in time. Moreover, their extravagantly textured surfaces challenged the encroaching power of recently-invented photography to potentially usurp the preeminence of painting practice.

It remains a curious fact that Impressionist painting has so steadfastly thrived in many parts of the world despite the fact that the radicalism of its original contexts has long since waned. Apiruk Punmoonsilp’s paintings of the Chiang Rai landscape, and, in particular, the vibrant local growth of sakura (cherry blossom), are testament to the continued unabashed visual pleasures of Impressionist painting. While the social contexts of this approach to painting might have long since been lost, Apiruk understands Impressionism’s intrinsic power as a means of capturing the effects of light-as-color.

Moreover, the artist has developed the visual rhetoric of Impressionism in terms of his interest in a greater sense of the solidity of form. Finally, and offering a parallel between challenges to 19th-century photography and challenges to the pervasiveness of digital reproduction in the 21st century, Apiruk insists on the artistic primacy of felt, tactile, experience.