Beacons in the
boozy night
Art November 24, 2017 01:00
By Paul Dorsey
The Nation
3,418 Viewed
In paintings
fiery with fluorescent light, Chris Coles saves from extinction those teasing,
tempting neon signs
American
artist Chris Coles has been wandering Bangkok’s
streets by night for years, hypnotised like a deer in the headlights by the
giddy, gaudy neon signage, and then going home to his lower-Sukhumvit studio to
paint it from seared, still-hot memory. It’s a wonder his vision isn’t
completely burned out.
Except
in those occasional moments when Coles isn’t in a rolling rage against Donald
Trump, his gaze does tend to glaze, but his vision is just fine. He sees Bangkok after dark better
than anyone around, and that includes the native street hawkers and hawkeyed
ladies who share this town’s shadows.
Coles was able to give his retinas a rest on a recent visit
home to the relaxing shores of Maine (habitat
of many deer – and also lobsters, as Bangkok
diners know). But the Atlantic had its own variation on frantic for Coles,
because he was also trying to mount a show in New York City.
The
presentation in the Big Apple would have entailed his portraits of that Trump
fellow and his bobbing and weaving band of White House advisers, a rogue’s
gallery that Coles has been gleefully sharing on Facebook the past year.
Alas,
the New York show didn’t work out, amazingly
enough for a place that seems to hate Trump, its hometown boy, more than any
other US
constituency. Still, a lot of folks in Thailand (maybe even General
Prayut, who’s met some of those Washingtonians) would love to see the
politicians’ paintings too, and maybe someday.
For
now, in the Big Mango, we have an entirely different selection of Coles’ work
to enjoy until mid-December, and a lot of it too – more than 50 pieces in all –
in the exhibition “Bangkok Neon” at Check Inn 99, a roomy and always fun
restaurant-cabaret on Sukhumvit Soi 33.
Just
opened last Thursday, the exhibition is a glowering beast of a sight. And
although Tracey Emin would be in her element there (pun explicitly intended),
it’s not all feverish tubular lettering. There are portraits in this one as
well, and the farang faces are quite familiar to those who follow expat
literature and music.
Check
Inn’s congenial Australian proprietor Chris Catto-Smith has obliged with a
battery of blacklights to make the fluorescent paintings pop, the better to
mimic the jarring effect that neon triggers in the dusk. The club, taking over
the digs formerly known as Christie’s (in homage to the auction house), proves
a highly accommodating venue for displaying art, but more on that in a moment.
Coles
prides himself on the rough, seemingly hasty brushwork and jaunty composition
that characterised the early-20th-century German Expressionism he admires so much,
and it’s a style that lends itself perfectly to depictions of Bangkok after sundown, in the figures, the
settings they haunt and the electrified gaslight that illuminates them.
His
human subjects, or at least those who’ve known they were posing for him, often
comment (amused but approvingly) on their jarring blue hair or green
complexions, but of course that’s entirely the result of the unnatural lighting
that enfolded them when Coles’ eyes snapped the shutter.
And
now for a lesson in neon:
Neon,
which is indeed a variant on the Greek for “new”, has been glowing in the urban
darkness since 1898, when British chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers
ignited a rapid (figurative) explosion of gas discoveries. But nitrogen,
oxygen, argon and krypton, they agreed, don’t look particularly sexy when you
turn off the lights.
Ramsay
chilled a lungful of air until it liquefied, then warmed it and captured the
gases boiling off. Once he’d bottled krypton, he was left with a gas that
glowed brilliant redorange under a rudimentary spectrometer – “a sight to dwell
upon and never forget”, Travers said. (They discovered xenon next, but they
just went, “Meh.”)
Until
1902, the problem with pouring neon into light bulbs was its scarcity.
Industrial-scale manufacture solved that, and by 1910 it was being shovelled
into sealed tubes, although homeowners found the colour a bit garish for
domestic purposes. It took another two years before its utility in advertising
signs made neon a success, and it played a central role in the combustion of America’s
“century of progress”.
By
the 1960s, Thailand
was hotwiring its own century of success and neon was lighting up the
nightlife, but in recent years the Golden Age of Red-Orange (and all the other
colours that neon was trained to generate) has dimmed.
Try
telling that to the first-time tourist on Soi Cowboy or Pattaya’s Walking Street, but
the fact is that a great many neon signs in Bangkok have been pulled down and, despite
their often-ornate artistry, they’re being heartlessly discarded.
Soi
33, where Check Inn 99 occupies the old Christie’s, became known as Soi Dead
Artists because of all the clubs there named after famous painters – Degas,
Goya, Renoir, Picasso, Dali et al. Those places all had memorable neon signs
forging their patron artists’ signatures, but both the clubs and the signs are
almost all gone now.
Fortunately,
our resident master of noir visuals, Chris Coles, has long been on a
self-appointed mission to document the Bangkok
night, and he’s dutifully recorded the signage that pulled in the
punters.
(His
effort to “bottle” the Bangkok night is a
one-man undertaking, he points out with almost comical dismay – with the sole
exception of Peter Klashorst, whose preferred turf is Phnom Penh. There were “hundreds of artists”
on the job in old Paris and Berlin. But the contemporary Bangkok night “has” to be
documented, Coles insists, because it too is “unique in the history of the
world”.)
