The most considered decision in A Place We Share is not what Kitti Narod paints, but the format he has chosen to paint it in. Most of the new canvases are cast in the 9:16 proportion of a smartphone screen — the vertical frame of a reel, a story, a feed. Installed at human height in the gallery at River City Bangkok, they require the same act of reading we bring to a phone: you stand close, the image fills your field, and you are no longer scrolling past but stopping to look.

Narod, who lives and works in Rome, has spent more than two decades building a practice around coexistence — his figures share water, embrace across difference, move through parks as equals. His palette is warm and his paint flat; joyfulness, in his hands, is not a naïve posture but a sustained argument. A Place We Share marks his first solo in Bangkok since Fragrant City in 2021, and the new body of work is at once formally more specific and more directly engaged with what has changed.

Kitti Narod painting of figures in striped clothing floating in blue water — Image: Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok / Kitti Narod

Room maps his own domestic life — a partner, cats, the rhythms of a shared apartment — into a large-scale canvas that treats the mundane with the attention usually given to history. Embarrassed gathers figures who cover themselves together: what could be private shame becomes, in aggregate, a collective response to the exposure of digital life. In Bare in Water, the recurring motif of figures in stripes — once carrying a sense of confinement — is released: the stripes are clothing now, fashion, a sign of identity rather than constraint.

Ritual is the show’s most historically specific work, registering the legalization of same-sex marriage in Thailand. Narod does not read it as resolution — the painting acknowledges the step while remaining aware of distance still to travel. Prithvi Mata takes a familiar religious image: the Thai goddess of earth, customarily depicted wringing water from her hair, here embraces another figure instead, nature around them both. Myth is not frozen history but a living source of imagery, available to be turned toward care.

The 9:16 paintings are, Narod has noted, drawn from scrolling — the fragment absorbed in passing, the image that barely registers before the next one arrives. By casting those proportions in acrylic and oil and standing them at gallery height, he creates a friction: the format of consumption becomes the format of attention. A Place We Share opens with a reception on 12 September at Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok, River City, and remains on view through 18 October.

The scroll made durable. That is Narod’s real subject here — not the utopia he paints, but the act of pausing long enough to imagine it.

Tags: A Place We Share, contemporary paintings, Kitti Narod, River City Bangkok, Tang Contemporary Art Bangkok