Are we just simple flecks of dust that make up an infinite universe, smaller than the atoms that make up our own bodies? Do we have agency within larger social structures and the forces of nature? Can we truly know ourselves? These are all the questions that Thai artist Mamablues asks and tests in her work. Through grayscale oil paintings covered in rough textures and chaotic splashes and scratches, she depicts dolls meant to be posed by their owners living subtly unique and content lives.
In Mamblues’ most recent solo exhibit, Cosmic Dust at Trendy Gallery, and other recent pieces, she’s taken a more serious direction from her past digital work and zeroed in on the fine art world. Her previous work of bright colors and playful digital paintings are stripped down to their bare foundations, resulting in black and white oil paintings on linen. The dolls she paints float in negative space and lay on blank surfaces, with body parts scattered about and random sections cut away. Sometimes their images are repeated over and over again, other times they’re placed next to seemingly identical bodies that secretly live their own, separate inner lives.
Focusing on gallery work has loaned a gravity and immediacy to the work of Mamblues, whose real name is Fawalai Fai. She says she appreciates this field of work since it forces her to summarize her ideas concisely within a limited space. It’s streamlined her ideas and aesthetics. The paintings have the feel of struggle to them, but the characters’ faces often have expressions of pleasure, and she stretched rainbows yarn across the middle of her show, complementing the poem she wrote to accompany it: “The rain has ceased, The sun’s now in sight, And we all can see the rainbow’s light.”
By using ball joint dolls, which are often used by artists as studies who pose them however they see fit, Mamablues comments on the agency we have in the world. “We’re only the owner of part of our life,” she explains. In her eyes, we’re all born into circumstances beyond our control that pull us along in whichever direction they’re headed. “In Buddhism, true freedom is only found in Nirvana, and nobody knows whether that’s actually achievable.” She also touches on the idea of yin and yang, with mirrored negatives placed beside each other, each tugging the other in opposite directions.
Rather than this being a bleak take on life, Mamablues challenges the idea that we have no agency simply through the act of painting it. Her work gives voice to her existence and capacity. And the idea that none of us are in total control feeds into the larger idea that we’re all in this together; that we all play very small roles in an incomprehensibly expansive picture. “The only thing perfectly whole is infinity, which is made of countless particles of dust,” she says. “There’s no me, no you, there’s just us.” That’s utopia to some.
