BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY is proud to announce a solo exhibition by street artist Alex Face (Patcharapol Tangruen): a collection of new still life paintings that blossomed amid the worry, inertia and boredom of Thailand’s recent lockdown, alongside two large-scale sculptures cast in bronze. As with Alive, his 2016 exhibition of impressionist oil paintings inspired by Claude Monet’s water lily landscapes, MONUMENT OF HOPE draws reverently upon painterly traditions to give us his poetic reading—cute on the surface yet imbued with a withering seriousness—of the present.

During the stay-at-home decree, he and his 11-year-old daughter turned to still-life painting to pass the time. Soon his wife was ordering flowers and he making works that drew upon both his street art skills and the classic compositions of the 17th-century Dutch painters he has long admired. Stuck at home, unable to travel out to paint on empty lots and abandoned sites, Alex Face found himself drawn to the humble artistry and allegorical symbolism of the medium, began using it to still his mind and say something about this wretched annus horribilis full of challenges both unforeseen and all-too predictable.

The main gallery mimics the hushed, contemplative viewing experience of Europe’s national galleries. Against the dark and crepuscular backgrounds of large paintings, luminous flowers burst from the pot-like head of Alex Face’s moody child. Flowers are age-old memento mori but these compositions also hint at glorious human potential in the here and now. Accompanied by butterflies of kaleidoscopic hues, each teeming bouquet is evocative of more than simply life’s transience—New ideas or transformative strains of thought, perhaps, flourishing in the fertile minds of Thailand’s young generation? Upon such a reading, the downcast look of Alex Face’s signature character—rendered with skilled realism on pots of concrete, brass, gleaming bronze and veined Carrara marble—suggests this potential will, if not nurtured and cross-pollinated, soon wilt.

Visitors enter through a vestibule-like chamber where a bronze sculpture invites us closer. Resonating in this bright anteroom is the ephemerality of life and all its earthly trappings, even those that appear most enduring: our art, our precious materials, our icons. But as well as tapping into his growing midlife angst over his own mortality, Alex Face also alludes to our political condition. His three-eyed, bunny-eared character sits, glumly pondering its predicament, on the edge of a stolid plinth built to last. This despondent figure could be waiting for change, or a chance to shine, or could be about to walk away in dismay and disillusionment, to give up on the idea of monuments altogether. In matching paintings, a pale butterfly bearing the brilliant nectar of youth flutters in the distance. At a time when statues are unceremoniously disappearing and falling, the pensive 39-year-old artist asks: Where are the heroes we deserve? Through his more hopeful forays into still life, he also gestures at where we might, one day, find them.