Nim Kruasaeng: The art of Isan

May 13, 2010 - PRLog -- By Pier Luigi Tazzi

With me he demonstrates an assiduousness that moves me, and an attention to things that always surprises me, used as I am to frenetically wandering in the wider world which for a few decades now has been open to everyone, yet nevertheless requires a quickness which discourages every attention which lasts longer than it needs to and so risks losing the right moment, every lengthy pause which implies a waste of energy and time.

He does not nourish himself with animals of his dimensions. Scrupulous to excess in his care for his image he has a reticence, bizarre to me, to "show his own body to everyone" as he puts it. He loves the warmth of the intimacy of human relationships, and the colour of open skies.

Sometimes, rarely at his explicit request, I have shown him the art with which I occupy myself. He looks at it with attention but without curiosity and has never expressed any judgement, as if it comes from a distant universe, and as if he possesses not a single tool to decipher its forms and substance.

When he learned that Nim was an artist, and so belonged to that universe which I occasionally gave him a glimpse of, he asked her one day at Pattaya to show him her works. We surprised them as they looked at them, but we did not intervene.

Later, much later, in one of those long conversations with which we occupy ourselves in the evening, he expressed his surprise and his enthusiasm. There a world opened to him, a happy one.

Something similar happened to me in my early teenage years when I first faced the universe of art: for me this was through the direct experience of the sculpture and paintings of 15th century Florence, of French Impressionists, of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso, of Greek sculpture, Papuan carvings, and Japanese art.

For me then, as for him now, art did not present itself as a response to the desire for beauty which is lodged in each one of us, as a confrontation with a universe of beauty, but as a practical opening to a world, actually to the world that both he now and I then are aware of inhabiting, and which has, for us, now disclosed its most suggestive entrance.

I believe that each of us has our own key. He found his in the art of Nim. I believe that this, beyond any judgment of worth, indicates something.

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Reinhart Frais of Asian Textile Art (http://www.asiantextileart.com/) has copyright to many essays relating to rare, antique Indian and Southeast Asian textiles.