EXHIBITED WORKS
Artesan Gallery + Studio
793, Bukit Timah Rd #02-01
Singapore 269765
Mutating Truths
April 15 - 30, 2010
“Who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without causing injury to the image?”
-Francis Bacon
In her every painting, Annie Cabigting works from an image of what, in a stroke of coincidence and/or inspiration, has gripped her. The artist’s affiliations, as this exhibit Mutating Truths demonstrates, are varied (from Joseph Kosuth to Matthew Higgs) and the mediums of her favored works are as far-ranging: from found objects to text to paintings to actual photographs. But despite these differences, they are invariably and deeply conceptual, staying true to their material components and in the process transcending them, flirting with the possibility of voicing an idea, a commentary.
If the Francis Bacon epigraph is to be believed, then, by the act of transference (from image to painting), Cabigting is causing “injury” to the original. But the concept of injury shouldn’t be supposed as a relative of violence (as the artist’s intent is not to destroy) but that of interpretation, which involves its inevitable movements and fissures. A foreign language, for instance, will suffer in the hands of its translator, no matter his adeptness. In the case of Cabigting, no work of hers is a direct quote; conscious decisions to veer away from the source have been made (such as to strip a neon installation of its color) apart from the nebulous, under-the-radar subtleties that ultimately make the works as the artist’s own.
Given the consistency of her vision and technique, the element of motive is asked. For Cabigting, the works she appropriates resonate with her own hunger for the conceptual—those exhilarating juxtapositions and incidences that render a spark to the randomness of contemporary life. It is also for her an engaging play, of finding tidbits that contribute to art’s mystique and mystery, such as the scribble of a Klein’s dedication to his critic-friend Pierre Restany at the back of his work.
It can be said that her every work is a species of praise not only because she brings it back to a fresh set of audience and to a new milieu but also because her painting invites us to go retrace its source, to check out the underlying narrative of why Michael Craig Martin tilted his bottles just so or why Francis Bacon cut out the faces in his portraits. Her work, with its evident references, is sustained by the history of art, the encompassing frame that embraces every conceivable manner of expressiveness.
Nothing but the belief in the urgency of art has led Cabigting to this brink of incomparable vision. Foregoing autobiography and overt political commentary, she admits larger and more ominous concerns and participates in the ongoing conversation of artists through their works. Her contribution is to make evident the interrelations of powerful ideas and re-negotiate their truthfulness in the face of an ever-shifting world.
By Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
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