CURRENT SHOW
Finale Art Gallery, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City
Indelible
January 3 to 22, 2008
The opening salvo of Finale Art Gallery for 2008,
"Indelible" by Bembol de la Cruz presents human
figures imprinted with articulate forms and symbols:
tattoo. Their bodies against a background of dissolved
shadows, they are uninhibited in revealing their
marks-ethnic symbols, typographical flourishes, the
Sacred Heart-whose significance lies in as much as
their emergence from pain as their evocation of
personal histories.
The artist, by approximating the tattooed bodies,
inflects stasis and attention to this artform whose
appeal and unique characteristic is that it is carved
on living and moving flesh. The tattoo's indelibility
is, in itself, an ironic statement: the inks and marks
will outlive the skin, but only for a certain time, as
the tattoo is consumed by mortality just like the rest
of the body.
"Indelible," curated by Roberto Chabet, is as much
representation as document after the fact. It
venerates tattoo as a valid form of art whose beauty
lies precisely on being rendered on a corruptible
canvas, contextualizing it in the broader scope of
image-making: the assortment of meaning-infused marks
with which we ink our passage through life.
