Hidden faces, hazy sight lines, dark tones, and dim lighting. This combination is mysterious and a bit terrifying; just how Molticha Pongudompanya likes it. The Thai oil painter values peering into the void, if only to recognize what lurks there. If you don’t understand what you fear, how can you ever overcome it or help someone else do the same?
Most people turn away from what frightens them and can’t understand those who gravitate towards it. Pongudompanya finds the horror beautiful, in a way. She luxuriates on the things that hide in the shadows and forgotten corners of the mind. There are indeed monsters beneath the bed from time to time. You may choose to ignore them, but that does not make them go away. In fact, they fester and grow like black mold, a texture and effect that she uses prominently in her work.
Pongudompanya says the darkness in her work comes from past trauma, and she hopes that by representing these difficult feelings in a beautiful way, she can entice viewers to hold their gaze instead of looking away. Despite her efforts to deal with and understand her pain, she can’t just shrug it off and move on. And there are countless more souls who feel the same. When you look at her work, she wants them all to be seen.
She toys with a sense of mystery, and to maximize this tension, the women in her paintings often hide their faces. It’s effective, but also an encouragement for the viewer to make an effort to understand others. Someone’s pain may not be obvious if you’re not paying attention. By turning their faces away or covering them with hair; it lures you closer, to make you take another step toward the darkness. Open that door, peek above the covers. She won’t bite, she promises.
Other times, Pongudompanya dispenses with the teasing and lets the demons loose. In one painting, a crying girl picks up an automatic rifle and swings it in the direction of the stress that won’t leave her be. Rather than an incitement to violence, the painting is actually meant to teach viewers that reacting in such a way can hurt others, not just yourself. In another painting, a bubbling, black mass piled on a gallery floor grows and climbs up the wall to the canvas hanging above.
Pongudompanya’s artwork is rarely gory. Usually it just luxuriates in unsettling environments. But occasionally there is blood, like the painting with a woman streaking her hand across a wall covered in tally marks that track her seemingly endless, bleak days. This represents the breaking point, where you learn what you’re made of. Humans rarely make significant change unless forced to; what would you do when there are no longer shadows to trick yourself with, when you can no longer deny that your fear is real. Will you succumb or prevail? An open mind and understanding heart are sometimes all it takes to make the difference in such a situation, and she hopes her paintings encourage you to offer yours to someone who may need it.
Ultimately, Pongudompanya wants us to understand each other better. She hopes we’ll treat each other with more compassion and less judgement. And she hopes that by refusing to deny what’s wrong with the world that we will value what we already have. Rather than obsess on despair, there is joy in her work as well, albeit subtly. There are slight smiles on a face here, bright tones there, some playfulness in a wisp of hair. She wants to heal, she wants you to heal too. But there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the work it takes to get there, a little dirt under the fingernails is something to be proud of.
