Flood: Paintings by Richard Tsao February 23, 2005

We are pleased to announce the opening on February 24th of Flood: Paintings by Richard Tsao. This will be the artist?s first solo exhibition at Chambers Fine Art. For the group exhibition Inverse Mirror held in November 2003, Tsao introduced a series of thick canvases saturated with color. The unique appearance of his work is the result of a long and elaborate process. Like the orchid growers of his native Thailand, he develops and nurtures his method-oriented abstractions until they come into full bloom. Beautiful to behold, Tsao?s transcendental canvases slowly reveal their nuances and reflect the inner light of the creator and elicit a wide variety of responses in the attentive viewer.

In his introduction to the catalogue, Benjamin Genocchio gives a vivid description of Tsao?s studio in Brooklyn, a paint-flooded basement densely hung with paintings in various stages of execution. ?Confident enough to let chance do a little of the work for him, he uses a unique immersion-sedimentation technique enabling deposits of paint dye mixed with marble dust and matte medium (as a binder) to build up and mould the surface of his paintings. It?s much like a chemical process, the artist soaking his paintings into the watery floor bath, hanging them on the wall to dry, then pressing, scraping and re-dipping them to bring the surface to completion.? Flooding, so much a part of the cycle of seasons in South East Asia, seems with hindsight a natural inspiration for the artist: no doubt the idea for his flooded studio floor springs at least in part from his childhood.

Born and raised in Thailand to Chinese parents, Tsao has lived and worked in New York since 1972. Thus although the encrusted surfaces and vivid colors of his abstractions, mostly quite small in scale, may evoke aspects of life in Bangkok as it was before globalization took over, he is keenly aware of the rich history of abstract art in the twentieth century. At a time when the majority of younger artists are looking in other directions, Tsao continues to develop his unique working method which results in the rugged yet refined abstractions that constitute the present exhibition, Flood.