Thai born, New York based artist Udomsak Krisanamis is best known for his richly textured collaged paintings which reflect his highly personalised approach to language. Taking thousands of words from newspaper text, Krisanamis obliterates letters while leaving untouched the negative spaces within such letters as 9, 8, 0 and b. Rendering the text invisible, he builds up densely layered, textured, shimmering surfaces, replacing language with pure optical effect.

When Krisanamis moved from Thailand to America a decade ago he taught himself English by reading the daily newspaper, crossing out all the words he knew with a pencil. As his knowledge of English improved so this disciplined and obsessive procedure would reveal a field of black from which only the odd unknown word would stand out. This created a patterned page that became the substructure for painting and collage combinations. In his later works, traditional art materials share pictorial space with tactile ready-mades, bits and pieces from coloured out newspapers, laundry receipts, cellophane, noodles and tea: glued in, enmeshed and stuck on. Layered into mesmerizing grids that resemble stellar landscapes, satellite imagery, twinkling city-scapes and blinking digital universes, the random patterns dictated by his collaged and marked sheets reveal at the same time the base nature of his materials. When looked at close up his works flip back and forth between the worldly and otherworldly, the sublime and the everyday.