James Prapaithong: So We Won’t Forget

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present So We Won’t Forget, an exhibition of new paintings by the Thai-born, London-based artist James Prapaithong, opening in New York on 13 March. The artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first solo presentation in the US features eight luminous canvases that meditate on the poetics of reflection.

In Prapaithong’s gauzy oil paintings, the artist explores the evocative power of light—how a particular slant or shadow can alter perception and call forth deeply held memories. Working from photographs, whether his own or pictures found on social media, he distills and reimagines these images into intimate passages. Tightly cropped and softly focused, his compositions carry an understated yet palpable sense of feeling. Cinematic in spirit, these paintings are at once vivid and elusive, suggesting places remembered rather than directly observed. In The World Made of Cloud (2025), for example, what initially appears to be a terrestrial landscape—mountains receding beyond a body of water—is subtly unsettled by a dimly glowing orb at the horizon. On closer inspection, the scene reveals itself as an expanse of sky, striated by shifting cloud formations.

Prapaithong’s early work responded to feelings of transience. He moved frequently while growing up, and this constant unmooring shaped his desire to understand what constitutes a home—specifically, which memories generate the emotional resonance of belonging, identification, and comfort. The artist found that, like Marcel Proust’s madeleine, specific qualities of light released involuntary memories, bridging the many places he had called home. The alchemical power of light became his subject: the way light obscures, abstracts, lays bare, and intensifies what it touches. In his paintings, light recasts seemingly unexceptional surfaces and scenes as otherworldly. In Windshield Comets, glittering hues streaked against a darkened ground might be read as interstellar phenomena or weather pulled against a dirty windshield. Whereas the more ambiguous Rewind is familiar yet ungraspable; its undulations of form and hue suggest water running over stones or moisture collected on a copper object. 

The moon—a dull mass that glows incandescent with reflected sunlight—holds particular interest for Prapaithong. During the isolation of the pandemic, he looked to the moon as a symbol of interconnectedness and shared experience. His recent paintings are interpretations of photographs, either snaps of everyday scenes the artist has taken or those gleaned from friends and acquaintances on social media. For the artist, pulling images that are presented publicly in a fleeting format and memorialising them in paint represents a form of connection and engagement that extends beyond the anonymity of the screen. Prapaithong zooms into his sourced photographs to find an excerpt that subtly abstracts and distils the larger image, granting him distance from realism as he approaches the canvas. He then determines a scale, either 4:3 or 16:9, that mimics film aspect ratios. These dimensions subtly guide the viewer to a familiar mode of looking associated with immersive experience. Always With Me, an image drawn from the social media of an acquaintance, features a passage of sky where the mottled forms of shadowy treetops are echoed by crisp cloud formations. The scene seems to quiver under a piercing beam of light, placing the viewer in its midst, looking glancingly at the bright sky or down at a trembling reflection in water.