SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Paul Thiebaud Gallery announced the opening of Suong Yangchareon: Distant Memories. The exhibition features a selection of nine paintings on canvas, and six watercolor and gouache paintings on paper depicting urban landscapes of street scenes, everyday architecture and neighborhood haunts.

Suong Yangchareon’s meticulously detailed paintings strike a balance of nostalgia offering familiar storefronts, vintage buildings and relics, and empty roads with a still, contemplative quality devoid of people. Deriving inspiration from his surroundings and sights during his “urban safaris” while driving throughout California, Yangchareon takes photographs to preserve the scene in front of him. While his paintings are realistic in technique, his paintings are not purely documentary and do not mirror the photograph in composition but rather capture the essence of passing time and distant memories. Reminiscent of Hopper, a sense of melancholy pervades his compositions in a quiet, detached manner.

While the canvases give Yangchareon the real estate to paint intersections such as West Adams and Red Bluff State or an expanse of San Francisco Bay or City Blues, a rooftop view of Los Angeles, the works on paper offer a more intimate and almost dreamier view with washes of color yielding to immediacy of the medium while retaining light and atmosphere, a staple of his work. The influence of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud can also be detected in the artist’s sense of color and in his interpretation of light as viewed in Silver Lake Rooftops and Little Manila, Stockton.

This exhibition presents a series of paintings that continue Yangchareon’s decades-long exploration of the built environment with its forgotten corners, industrial relics and fleeting moments of stillness that borders on reverence.

Suong Yangchareon received his BS at Woodbury University in Los Angeles and has also studied at Silpakorn University and at the Arts & Crafts College (Poh Chang) in Bangkok. His works have been exhibited across the United States and internationally, and can be found in numerous private collections and various museum collections. This is Suong Yangchareon”s eighth exhibition with Paul Thiebaud Gallery.