TROPICAL MALICE

Tropical Malice is an installation by Giles Ryder to accompany his solo exhibition at H Chiang Mai. These events are the result of an award from Asialink Arts Residency in Australia which supported Ryder to produce works at Ne’Na Contemporary Artspace in Chiang Mai.

Tropical Malice is H Gallery’s third collaboration with the Bangkok-based artist.

Ryder’s practice has a hard-edged quality that plays with the coded significance of form and he works with a variety of media that includes lacquer, light, mirror and foam. The often reflective surfaces of his works suggest an advertising or consumerist sensibility but this is countered by a meditatively minimal and geometric aesthetic. Moreover, as dense presences within the gallery space the works’ sense of objecthood can subtly draw our attention to the very experience of site and space.

For both spaces at H Chiang Mai and H Project Space, Ryder has adapted readymade light structures from Cambodia, where they are usually situated behind Buddha statues in a temple and throw mandala patterns. The artist is interested in the diverse significance of the technology as it suggests both religious worship and the hypnotic world of techno or disco music. A series of soft geometric paintings make a skewed reference to Mondrian and other giants of canonical art history. Here grids of primary colours are treated with metallic and fluorescent finishes and create while dissolving pictorial space. For Ryder it is the transgression of a ‘pure’ use of materials and form that allows for the emergence of new artistic languages.

Ryder’s installations and paintings offer shifts that cross the perceptual and felt experience of materiality and formal qualities to bring us to culturally embedded meanings in an off-kilter and always fascinating manner.