Combining poetry, geometry, and the artist’s own difficult history, Cambodian artist Savann Thav’s recent artworks will be presented at Singapore’s Intersections gallery in an exhibition entitled “Embroidered Dreams.”Although his paintings are mainly acrylic abstracts, their tones and shapes represent aspects of nature, bringing to mind living organisms likes trees and corals reflecting his interest in fractals, patterns that are repeated endlessly across scales, as found in mathematics and in nature.The gallery guide for“Embroidered Dreams” begins with a quote from the founder of fractal geometry, Benoit Mandelbrot that encapsulates Thav’s work, describing spatial patterns of nature “that are either irregular or fragmented to such an extreme degree that … classical geometry … is hardly of any help in describing their form.”This interest in what is naturally fragmented reflects Thav’s personal experiences from a young age. He lost his mother when he was just three and fled Cambodia 16 years later, becoming a refugee in Vietnam and later Paris, which has been his home now for close to 40 years. Although his paintings do not tell his life story in a straightforward manner, the artist nevertheless sees them as autobiographical, with the interplay between colors and shapes representing emotions associated with certain moments of his life. Certain combinations suggest tsunamis, uprooted trees, or disrupted habitats, all particularly loaded metaphors for the artist’s experiences as a young man and his life since finding a home in Europe.Not every work, however, is rooted in difficulty. Some are full of abstract areas reminiscent of the other side of nature: the rebirth and recovery that follows natural disasters.Taken together, the works present a picture of one man’s life through nature and through fractal-like abstraction.“Embroidered Dreams” runs from March 3 through April 16, 2016 at Intersections.
↧