Jiab Prachakul: Rendezvous in Time

Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce Rendezvous in Time, an exhibition of new paintings by Jiab Prachakul. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery—as well as her second solo exhibition ever and her first show in New York—will include nine canvases that explore the construction of identity and exemplify Prachakul’s cool mode of romantic realism.

In her cinematic paintings, Prachakul (b. 1979, Nakhon Phanom, Thailand) elevates quotidian scenes through subtle intervention. The artist—who grew up in Thailand and has since lived in London, Berlin, Lyon, and now Vannes, Brittany—creates quiet compositional tableaux featuring herself and her friends, a community largely composed of Asian designers, musicians, and artists living in Europe. Rigorously observed, her figures are pictured alone or in small groups, engaged in contemplation or deep listening. These paintings translate aspects of the artist’s reckoning with identity as something that is unfixed and constantly transformed, including one’s senses, relationships, geography, and cultural codes. Though her works are characterized by formal precision and restraint, some passages luxuriate in the folds and drapery of garments or the chaos of overgrown foliage. These moments of careful indulgence lend the compositions a sense of long exposure and suspended time. Prachakul studied film before turning to painting, and her mise-en-scènes reveal the stylistic influence of Eric Rohmer and Yasujiro Ozu, evoking intense emotions that aren’t explicitly expressed.

Spanning two rooms that represent cycles of day and night, the paintings in Rendezvous in Time (all painted in 2022) reflect the period in which Prachakul moved to Vannes, just after the pandemic. Feeling isolated in a new home, the artist yearned for connection with her family and friends, and sought to relive experiences of closeness. The works collected here offer intimate scenes reconstructed from the artist’s memory alongside those from her current life in France. Together, these canvases reflect the way identity is experienced as a synthesis of manifold selves, past and present, just as they document the process of constructing oneself anew in an unfamiliar place.

Across the daytime scenes, Prachakul casts her figures in crisp, blue light and a gauzy palette of buttery pastels. The diptych Instilled fuses two settings—the left panel features the view from the window in the artist’s former apartment in Lyon, and on the right is the vantage from her current home in Vannes. The vistas share a shade of sky, but their architecture and horizons don’t align. An accompanying audio component immerses the viewer in each of Prachakul's distinct worlds, with spirited chirps and a gentle drizzle of rain. She also applies this cutaway strategy in the extraordinary diptych Maison Rose, which features in the nocturnal sequence. Here, on the left, two figures quietly paddleboard on the Gulf of Morbihan against a shimmering wilderness. On the right is the eponymous pink house as it might be seen by the approaching paddlers. The juxtaposition of these perspectives introduces an element of movement to the overall image. Expressing great empathy and hermetic pleasure, Prachakul’s recent paintings offer a deeply inquisitive and humanist approach to figuration.