See previous exhibits

NIKKI LUNA

Violence Need Not Be Bloody For It To Be Validated As Such

There are seemingly two narratives in this space. The five thousand bullets were planned months ago to approximate the drug-related extra-judicial killings, with the thought of giving the tally a generous leeway. To date, there are more than 6000 victims, outnumbering the bullets by a thousand. Meanwhile, on the other wall is a single cast of a skirt identical to the Vice-President's wardrobe. The cast recalls the infamous statement of the President regarding the length of his woman Vice-President’s skirt. To conjure symbolic violence against the very real deaths of thousands of citizens seems itself a form of violence and injustice against the dead. But perhaps it is in this reiteration where one can truly see that violence, in its many forms, is but a Hydra with the same monstrous core.

For every man felled in this war, is a woman/wife/partner who lost her love, home, and dignity. Left alone to fend for their children and living, they have to both seek for help and shield themselves against the perpetrator that is the State. The consumption of symbolic violence in everyday narrations begets violence of other mutations. The women bear the brunt of both status quo and gender prejudice. In the parade of urgent concerns plaguing our society, the woman debacle is not just a dearth whose value is measured by the length of her skirt.

Her narrative is firmly intertwined with that of the war, as can be seen in a projected actual video documentation. It shows how, after a murder of an alleged drug pusher in Catarungan St., Manila—a woman, holding back tears, conscientiously sweeps the blood of her beloved. It is an act not just meant to clean the desecrated home. It is a careful erasure of the carnage, lest the police come back for her and her family. Where blood has been shed and painstakingly wiped away lies the eye of this political storm—an inertia brought on by infinite pain and silenced rage of the subaltern, obliged to stay and carry the burden of caring for her dead and damned.

JONATHAN CHING

La Strada

Jonathan Ching’s latest solo exhibition of new works in painting revolves around the wanderer’s sensate encounter with the street: an exploration of place, inhabited by things, and a revisiting of ways to look at the ubiquitous presences of the everyday. Four paintings attest to Ching’s affinity for delving into such states of wonder, all starting out as images, shot on his mobile phone while cycling around his neighbourhood. Tarpaulins covering surplus machines and roadside blooms, both seasonal and transient in appearance, loom large and fascinating through the artist’s eyes. Ching’s translation of these daily sights and digital images into paintings teases out both volumes and textures otherwise obscured and changes the most ordinary instances of seeing into puzzles or mysteries to be uncovered. This is evident in how Ching titles his individual works: the street and its objects are transformed into indeterminate landscapes, transient yet unchanging like the sea. In the end, what renders Ching’s aesthetic wanderings special is how he manages to uncover other worlds, settled quietly within ours.

WIRE TUAZON

METANOIA (Life Studies)

LUGAS SYLLABUS

Natural Born Worker

Tales from Nowhere by Patrick D. Flores

When you look at it, the painting feels like it belongs to a world that feeds on hypermedia, this ensemble of interactive forms of the digital, or even, the post-digital world. And yet, you sense something very familiar, or made familiar, by a range of stimuli, from personal memory to tourism to childhood urges. Otherworldly, you might say, but quite close to your impulses. After all, it is fantasy, and therefore intimate in all its misshapen details. It will seem to you that the fulsome painting does not only flirt with hypermediated images, it is, in fact, the fertile screen on which these images thrive. The intimacy with which the imager maker hews his images is so inextricable, and perhaps obsessive, that you tend to believe that you are immersed in a hypermedium itself and that, like the images swimming around your baffled vision, you verisimilarly breed in its ground. Lugas Syllabus is a young painter from Jogjakarta, an important site of production in the always active art world of Indonesia. The atmosphere of the field is so hectic and the impetus for images is so breathtaking that an emerging practitioner will either have to sink in the temptation or to vainly resist it and consequently create his own imaginarium. It will take a truly discerning intelligence to think through the thicket and labyrinth of signs in this dense social life. It is at this point that you will probably surmise that the artist stakes out his own terrain of inventions and semblances. In other words, he makes his own archive that poaches on a multitude of references. The subject of a vernacular house in Palembang being transported to Europe, for instance, does not only become an occasion to describe the condition of a migrating house or an instance of social commentary on migration in the current global circuit. It becomes an opportunity for Syllabus to set up his own narrative, gather his own iconography, and spin his own fictive context of unexpected scenarios, characters, tensions, and relationships. In many ways, this context becomes very challenging for the viewer. You confront it with a mixture of strange feelings and disturbing sensations. You are confused. You lose coordinates. You do not know if it is humor or the macabre. You do not know if a fairy tale has taken a wrong turn or if it has found its true plot. You finally give in to the chance of traveling to another universe proposed by the artist and ask yourself if his pictorial sphere is still earth or it is just too worldly. One of the ways to portray the world today is distraction. There are just too many demands on the sightseer or the onlooker or the attentive observer. You are inevitably distracted, unnerved, unhinged, regardless how you invest in the labor to pause and take in what is before you with the pace that is not in cadence with the whirl of the planet that drapes you. You are, in short, fixated. And to a great extent, Syllabus makes that possible through his visual practice that is quite daring, heedless, and seemingly liberated from the expectations of the Indonesian art world. That being said, the artist benefits from earlier forays into this sort of arena of highly mediated images. You might, of course, be reminded of the work of I Nyoman Masradi or Wedhar Riyadi and the various expressions lying between these spectrums – and without doubt, the Jogjakarta surrealism of the eighties and nineties. But the corpus of Syllabus is a bit brasher, less anxious about the requirements of either identity politics or the conceptualisms that supposedly define the contemporary. What is obviously the vein of the artist’s art is his capacity for adventure, the kind that had sustained the comics tradition of an earlier era. Thus, the forms are robust, intrepid, quite fearless. You might say excessive and overly grisly. They are rendered in acrylic, the better to make their presence more urgent and immediate, unfiltered by too much art history and too much contemporary art, enhanced by the techniques of advertising, billboard painting, street art. In fact, you might mistake it for being in cyberspace or in a virtual platform, though the painting is nevertheless cogent, confidently built up, and competent in the simulation of plasticity, with very deep perspectives and evocation of rigorous figuration. In his works for Manila, the object of focus is the countryside that is seemingly invaded by both antiquity and mass media. In a statement, Syllabus confides: “Doing arts has been an important part in my life. What I do in my life has a great influence in the creative process of my art, where both attractions and repulsions combined to form the influence.” It is by confronting “attractions and repulsions” that the artist is able to overcome the lure of typical iconographies and venture into bolder, more daring realms of picture making. Like his mind’s eye, such a confusion is generative. It makes you think about the relationship between painting and what is called “second life” in cyberspace. You might interchange his subject or his subject matter with an avatar that wildly mutates and transforms with alacrity. Syllabus is without doubt a painter of his time, a time that he takes seriously and takes it to that limit at which painting dissolves into the sea of hypermedia, and yet floating still as some kind of ebullient survivor, complicating once more the Indonesian reflection on “reality” and the “real,” a wellspring of wonder and unease as timeworn as Sudjojono and as recent as Syllabus.

FELIX BACOLOR

Thirty Thousand Litres

“The descent into Hell is easy.” - Virgil, The Aeneid

Felix Bacolor’s installation piece makes reference to the continuing bloodshed under the current dispensation. The volume of 30,000 liters, represented through 150 steel drums capable of containing 200 liters of liquid each, alludes to the amount of blood spilled in the course of the administration’s war against drugs since June 2016. The numbers of the dead, whether complicit or innocent in this brutal war, have risen to 7,025 people as of January 22, 2017. Bacolor notes that one person needs around five liters of blood to live; 30,000 liters represents the sum total of lives cut short, robbed of the chance to change. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, a proverb goes. But this paving of ways can quickly morph into an endeavor that devours all in its path. In making visible the volume of bloodshed, Bacolor makes a stand against both the “systematic, industrial-scale purging” and the blatant disregard for human life that has risen to atrocious levels to date. Stacked like goods in an industrial storage facility, the steel drums stand as a continuing monument to loss, complicity and impunity. To pass by its presence as an art object casts a question to the viewer: does one just stand by as this monstrosity grows?

(Lisa ito)

ROMINA DIAZ

see no evil

Anesthetized: To render physically insensible, as by an anesthetic. We have become anesthetized to the daily bombardment and overload of images through media. We have become apathetic to poverty; numb towards brutality, violence, pain, hunger and death. Empathy is disappearing. The armor of egotistical survival separates our fate from the lives of the ones most affected; our voices are kept meek. See No Evil 2017 is a sound installation that deprives you of sight. It concentrates on sounds of events and moments that compel you to either stand, leave, stay or listen. The installation desires to stimulate lost sensitivity and to evoke human compassion. It is a reminder that we are part of the greater whole, that we are not separated from everything happening around us. It is a warning: everything will catch up with the reality we create around ourselves. Inside these glass bowls that we blow so confidently around us are the stones of reality that shall sooner or later shatter such shelter, leaving only shards of glass.

Romina Diaz, 2017 Manila, Philippines

SOLER SANTOS

Hybrid Pictures

Pictures never lie. Or do they? Hypothetically, this poised doubt consists the crux of its seduction and hold over a viewer. In its supposed falsehood it remains as the truthful mirror that reflects back, and, ambitiously, it is “the” probable tool for mastering an examined life. Soler Santos proceeds to tell the tales of picture making in “Hybrid Pictures,” a suite of works in various media and mostly on paper and a couple on canvas that make the exhibit title hit the mark. The crossbreeding mostly occurs in a stylistic pitting of charcoal drawing that beautifully mimics, in its own way, a photograph collaged on the picture’s ground. The works herewith evidence Soler at his very best – an artist exploring the boundaries of medium and its meaning, technique and its translated form, that coincides with the artist opening up to something riskier and bolder that puts him on the cusp, if not precipice, of artistic epiphany that marks an artist’s own pilgrimage from one level to the next. As a spectator-audience, what is immediately captivating about the recent works is Soler’s departure into drawing, mainly using charcoal, and that also departs from the artist’s signature brand of photo-realistic painting. What is on view is produce that is freer, more graphic, strong, and exuding with the grime and traces of physical, artistic labor that are rarely permitted in the artist’s outputs. The push and pull of the image-copied and image-offspring reiterate the conceptual underbelly that structures the technically proficiencies of Soler’s oeuvre. “Hybrid Pictures” appears to tackle the problem in a number of ways. An obvious discourse is the variety of techniques employed in executing a picture. One of the works on an intermediate scale and on canvas features a photo-image of a tied-up animal – presumably a horse, collaged on the picture’s ground. A couple of images serve to complement, one that features a geometric array that consists an abstract painting, and the other an image of an anonymously assembled sculpture. The drawings emitted from these three central images go all over each other, superimposed, subdued, encompassed, and forms the artist’s stylish manner of composition. Another artistic problem presented is the idea of the real. The “real” meant is the idea of what is truth and absolute that is, more often than not, given the current scenario of the times, opposed by the man-made copies that are proliferated especially in the mass-media systems of today. Since the beginning of conscious intelligence, Plato poetically opposed the idea of artists making copies via representations in painted landscapes and still life genres. On to the modern age of the 20th century, Picasso and Braque (agreed upon by many art thinkers) decided to put the real into each ones’ Cubist painting by pasting real and actual objects from the outside world. Introspectively, do the paintings with objects pasted on it become part of the real world? Some disagree, but quite optimistically, by calling these excursions not equilaterally real but more real than what is real – it is a hyper real. Art seems to grow as an autonomous entity that consumes life itself. Echoing Plato, again, should it still promulgate? The more immediate problem, the last but not the least, though it could have been placed second in the order of notes, is more pleasing, or pleasurable, as it extricates its issues from the first two, but is connected somewhat with the first point. It deals mainly with the creation of the art object. Soler seemingly raises the question that understands the source of inspiration – what comes first, the model for a work or the resulting work? In creating a simultaneous space that allows for both to exist on one picture plane, the question is posed but, somehow, naturally, obliterates itself – rendering the question irrelevant if not unnecessary. Ordinarily, one is encouraged to assume it is an exercise of sorts, or a reality-TV program where one demonstrates before the public his ability to draw by including his reference. But the thought never really crossed the mind. In the context of a parade of palimpsest paintings in recent times – from Picabia, Ernst, Salle and Polke, the superimpositions of images only betray the genius of its authors in destroying the naturalistic perspective that often confine the traditional painter. In making the “Hybrid Pictures,” he resolves the quandary of priority in which is more significant – the copy or the source. In this case, there is no way to separate each – the coexistence is vital. It extends the directive of a closed system. In one big work, Soler superimposes charcoal forms over pictures of Greek statues, and these are regarded as perfectly proportioned models. But the drawn image, or which is the copy in the course of this discussion, magnifies the experience. Not by making a bigger scale, but magnifying the perception of the model, and thus enhancing our own experience in its entirety.

(Jonathan Olazo)

MONA SANTOS

MONA

CARINA AND ISABEL SANTOS

Obscurities

RANELLE DIAL, KEIYE MIRANDA, IAN QUIRANTE, CARLO VILLAFUERTE

Gathering

LUBIN NEPOMUCENO

redyellowandblue fever

Unpainting Paint a line Paint a shape Paint a color Paint a texture Paint a form Paint a meaning Paint a question Paint an object Paint layers Paint a memory Paint a history Paint to start Paint to end Paint to taste Paint life

ANNIE CABIGTING

Private Viewing

‘Private Viewing’ is both the culmination and continuum of an experiment that Annie Cabigting started in 2012. Toying with the concept of concealment as an extended and possibly permanent exhibitionary state, Cabigting’s solo exhibition at that time titled ‘Under Wraps’ presented a series of concealed paintings positioned on pedestals. The sequence of carefully covered canvases remained in this state of prolonged suspension: eluding the anticipated act of unveiling within and beyond their existence in the gallery space. This exhibit revisits and presents images from ‘Under Wraps’, five years after they have been dispersed throughout individual collections. The cycle of their lives as objects for private viewing goes full circle in this show, revealing their states of display half a decade after this initial act of anticipation. What has changed? What remains and may change? Cabigting’s long durational gestures tease out the nature of painting as both concealment and revelation: transforming the act of covering into the process of conjuring.

CARLO GABUCO, ROBERT LANGENEGGER, WIRE TUAZON, JEONA ZOLETA

Independence Day

BEMBOL DELA CRUZ

Misuse

Objects has its purpose of use They are created for the function they are assumed to be use for. These basic hand tools have solid character. The imagination for misappropriating this objects are enormous. Objects may lead to use as a weapon. A person surmounted in anger and hatred creates the psychological impulse to use objects in a different way. Reflex and initial reactions for defense lead to faulty use of certain object. It can happen anytime, anywhere whether it’s spontaneous or intentional. Basic hand tools with a misleading use enforce a great agony and torment both physically and mentally. Objects that are being misused and abused.

REDD NACPIL

Smoke 'Em Phantoms Out

MONICA DELGADO AND MICHELLE PEREZ

Painting in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)

Twists and turns in the practice of painting are navigated in this joint exhibition by Monica Delgado and Michelle Pérez. The first time for the two artists to show their works together, Painting in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing) gathers their series of recent objects mainly produced using poured and layered acrylic paint: vividly-colored and viscous forms shaped through both controlling the medium and letting it flow. What the two artists have in common is a sensate respect and wonder for the material qualities and the physical form of paint: how it can go beyond being a means to producing an illusionistic image to being the object of visual perception itself. The medium, reanimated, harbors vast possibilities. When wielded in different ways, paint assumes an entire horizon of colors, textures and shapes: it can flow freely or be contained, cut, coiled, and manipulated.

Pérez shows paintings created in the course of a year through the physical processes of flowing and pouring. Her Color Chart (Influx series), comprised of 48 small canvases forming a color chart, is patiently made through letting multiple waves of poured paint settle on gently inclined canvases to produce muted monochromatic and sculptural planes. The circular work White Water III could be considered as a culmination of such a process: producing forms that connote the flux and ebb of tides. Much bolder hues and more sculptural inclinations, on the other hand, emerge in her Post-it and Paint Drops series made from collaged drops of dried paint fused on to different formats: from the vertical rod to shaped canvases.

Delgado, on the other side, offers parallel explorations of acrylic paint as a physical medium: one, dried as long strips resembling thread or rope and then coiled and tied to wooden stretchers and, two, cut up as composite paint chips and fused into blocs. The series reflects Delgado’s interest in exploring the physicality and materiality of paint as a means to make three-dimensional objects. Paint assumes the quality of other three-dimensional objects: rope and textile, grit and stone for instance. Delgado also shows interest in reanimating the idea of drawing through a series of works in graphite in a gel medium suspension.

Working with this medium and process, Delgado and Pérez explore in their own ways the possibility of painting without the tools of painting: perhaps pointing to how, within the practice of contemporary art, painting may not be in trouble, after all.

(Lisa Ito)

NICOLE COSON

SKIN

SKIN is a series of photographs accidentally captured before or after a significant event. Within each of these photographs are instances fossilised in a flurry of stretched lights, flashing limbs and blurred figures. Coson’s images capture lost details within anonymous spaces evoking an open story which focuses on the act of viewing rather than what lies within the photograph. This leaves the viewer attempting to grab visual cues and familiar shapes to build a narrative. However like memories, images cannot respond to you. Each snapshot carries only the residue of a moment never to be repeated again yet these moments remain ever present before our eyes on a distant yet perpetual loop. Within the space, memories are fragmented and reassembled chronically spanning four years of Coson’s life. Each frame a fraction of a second, but once arranged together the collection encapsulates years.

CATALINA AFRICA-ESPINOSA

The end of a new me

The show begins and ends with a painting. With each footstep I move closer and closer to myself Towards the hierarchy of my highest being. I am only a reflection of my surroundings, on a perpetual quest for enlightenment. A dissolution of self into the landscape. Karma gets recycled. I continue my studies on the movement of water As my gaze is always upon the sea. Raindrops fall on an ocean of bliss. How to give thanks to the universe. How to be me.

LYRA GARCELLANO

Gordian Knot (a series of notes)

To begin with history: The 1884 Exposicion Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid, where Filipino expatriates gathered in celebration for the victory of two compatriots, Juan Luna who won the gold medal for his work Spoliarium, and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo who won silver for the painting Las Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho. It was considered the apex of Philippine Art, a triumph not only for the artists but also for the country. Finally, “equal” racial footing was deemed attained with the colonizers. Centuries after, this aim for Western recognition remains: gatekeepers and institutions, whose backgrounds and practices carry the same anxieties and ways of compensation, dictate the standards of validation.

Culture as pronounced by the state and an ambivalent arts education carry the baggage of still being secondary to the international. Practice-wise, a different level of legitimacy is received when an artist is able to conform to global awards and exchanges. The very process of immigration vetting involves having to repeatedly prove oneself through literal political borders—- another structural imposition that controls the movement of cultural practitioners. Even the notion of mapping and positioning Southeast Asian art, a geopolitical currency and capital coined by the West and utilized by most artists today, is a manner of categorization that fuels the hierarchy. Legend has it that whoever is able to untie the Gordian knot will become the ruler of Asia.

In continuation of Lyra Garcellano’s research, as seen in her previous exhibitions Double Consciousness and Dear Artist..., the artist continues to be the pin in the middle and at the same time the one venturing to release the impossible tangle, where pulling on either ends only fastens it further. Attempts to loosen this have been numerous, with the knot staring blankly on whoever tries. The arbitration presented is open-ended: the loophole has not been found nor has the tie been cut.

IPAN M. IRFAN

After Mooie Indie

In this show of new works, young Indonesian artist Irfan Ipan appropriates and references the conventions of Mooi Indie (Beautiful Indonesia): referring to the genre paintings and idyllic landscapes produced by Dutch artists visiting the archipelago during the turn of the 20th century. Rooted in the country’s colonial history and the complex transfer of modernity’s visual traditions, the practice of producing pleasing vistas and prized genre paintings is also shadowed by disrepute as early 20th century artists such as Sindu Sudjojono called for an art that not only bears witness to the world, but also captures with realism the crisis brewing across the land and sea. Currently completing his studies in art in Yogyakarta, Ipan explores pictorial responses to this tradition in a series of paintings based on photo and paper reproductions of Indonesian landscapes. The works capture images of familiar scenes and land masses of the artist’s home country, such as the mountains and volcanoes of Krakatoa (Krakatau) between Java and Sumatra. After Mooie Indie reminds one of how visual image goes beyond the production of pretty pictures but also embraces the practice and weight of politics, history and contemporaneity.

(Lisa Ito)

LIV VINLUAN

The Islander Chronicles

The Islander Chronicles was first started by Liv Vinluan in 2011, and was the basis for her 2015 work, Cariño Brutal. In this exhibition, Vinluan revisits the series. Executed in the manner of 19th century Spanish-colonial watercolor paintings, she goes on a further, searching examination of the time and the tides that culminated in a continuously perplexing history.

NILO ILARDE

Almost Doing Nothing

(The Abyss Stares Back)

Three apparent works in the form of found objects arranged in puzzling and oxymoronic visuals interplay with site and context. These are likened to spectacles that narrate perceived paradoxes. Such make manifest an advancing detached aesthetic that has been perfected in the main oeuvre of conceptual artist Nilo Ilarde. In “Almost Doing Nothing,” the artist hints at his employed strategies that ride on unrelenting waves of conceptualism, but now somewhat emphatic on engaging a specific space. On the Mezzanine Gallery, a handily jotted down phrase from the artist’s notebook works its way in setting the tone for a probable artistic construct. It reads, “Place Rather Than Thing.” The said phrase has found the artist in the midst of his constantly investigative practice. It is more likely to envision Ilarde’s approach to his work as predominantly guilt-free – as something decisive in negating the trappings of illusionistic painting effects and decorative intuitions. But there is something human, feeling-laden, and even faintly nostalgic for the exhibition on hand.

Highly likely, the platforms that are the artist’s influences are mostly characterized by rigid and antiseptic conceptualism. But, there is a lot of intuition and storytelling told in these specific puzzles that hit a major nerve and endure. In a wide paraphrase of a critical observation forwarded by the theorist of postmodernity Craig Owens: allegory is tasked to rescue us, even for the least very bit, and the allegorizing of history makes us realize the importance it once held and will do so again. The Mezzanine piece consists of a marquee signage where the aforementioned text is written out. Placed atop a bare-bones platform, the coupling of the parts suggest a critique-of-sorts on systems of art commerce, as both are remains and detritus of dismantled and renovated galleries. The signage comes from a gallery once located in Katipunan Avenue, and the platform structure constructed using the actual exhibition walls of a gallery that transferred venues in Makati. This stark and challenging juxtaposition brings to mind Nicolas Bourriaud's observations that the art gallery is the muse where interaction is transacted.

As it is, the investigation, engagement and synthesis of a given context fuels the mainstay tenet of conceptual art. At the edge of the mezzanine pathway is Finale Art Gallery’s designated room for video works – a very pleasant sanctuary dedicated to the said medium and artists who delve in such works. Ilarde makes an intriguing video work, “Video with the Story of Its Own Making,” in that there is no work at all, or to be more precise, not that there is in the traditional sense and definition of a video work. Again, true to high conceptualism’s drastic methods of intervention of space (like a sliced house or a bored gallery wall or floor), the artist delivers a site coup – not only in producing an non-existing video but also by incising five window frames, approximately the size of an A4 sheet, in increasing depths revealing the “private” history of the said wall and its physical structure that holds it up, till the final bore sees a window through and through. By not doing an actual video work Ilarde filters out the essential nature of a video medium: a successive progression of recorded images tell a story; there is an act of voyeurism in recording images and this gaze holds much power; can Mr. Benjamin (Walter) concur that a non-image image still bring us together – a momentary breach to contemplate its function?

The piece de resistance is the unique, surrealistic tableau “Long Work, (There is a Labyrinth which is a Straight Line. – Borges), for Chabet.” A couple of painter’s easels suspended from the ceiling with attached mirrors act as bookends to a singular, portable yet “monolithic” object, that is a bronze cast of a unit that served in a long line of cement hollow blocks that was an actual component of Roberto Chabet’s work, “Labyrinth.” Chabet’s very grand gesture of a work once occupied this current outlay. A huge maze formed by cement hollow blocks with glass shards are reminiscent of low-tech fortifications while flood lights placed around the perimeter enhanced the simulation. Is it a fortress under siege, or, a siege of the self (a reinterpretation of a colleague’s interpretation)? In Ilarde’s re-interpretation/appropriation, the gallery’s industrial lights are commandeered and brought down to the floor and spotlight the cast hollow block. Both the manipulation of site and casting are Ilarde’s known strategies in his arsenal. The technical procedure of casting has its own connotations and its application translates into allegories. On hand, a very ordinary object is perhaps rescued and elevated with a more permanent translation into bronze. It furthers the point that the object of focus is made sacred. Placing the said cast object (the Chabet hollow block) between two mirrors facing each other opens a host of interpretations. The visual effect of such setup is suggestive of the infinite kaleidoscope that leads the eye to that visual trick of a never-ending perspective, a sequential infinity. It is a psychological labyrinth that elicits a reaction that seems to say: the abyss stares back.

Forging ahead and on a very wide platform, the “quiet” approach instigated by Ilarde is not deafeningly silent at all. It is also important to realize too much reading into these spoils the game afoot, as it is a highly likely second guess the artist would rather have a spectator enjoy these visuals and have his/her own plaudits. The very influential writer Susan Sontag wrote in her piercing essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” “The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence.” And duly brings to fore Samuel Beckett’s thoughts, “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” Veering from an objective platform, Ilarde stays the course of an art form that persists to challenge easy conventions of what a painting is. This same colleague once remarked, he is “the last man standing” in a generation of artists who cares for the wellbeing of a healthy art – not the mutated kitsch that succumbs to the sugar and soda that dangerously feeds the eyes and minds of easy pleasure and candy appetites. It is a hard hat role that not just anyone can wear

(Jonathan Olazo)

KIM OLIVEROS

Nested Memories

In my most recent works I continue to examine my personal life and artistic practice through my paintings. In the process of working on this exhibition I was given a notice by my landholder informing us that our contract will not be renewed. This move meant a major change for me, I have been living here the past 7 years and I consider this place my home. This made me reflect on my personal history; what is home? And to what extent is my artistic practice rooted in this idea of ‘home’? How will this unpredictability move my art and me? I did have a lot of questions to myself after being confronted with this predicament.

Nothing is permanent; the only constant thing in life is change. ‘Home’ is not a place; your home is you. These answers revealed themselves to me and together with this change I was going through, I realized my artistic practice was also transitioning and evolving. In a series of 10 paintings entitled Fragments I started indexing my personal belongings from my home of 7 years and took photos of them reminiscent of still life paintings of the Middle Ages. I painted these commonplace objects, which have sentimental meaning to me; some were given to me as a gift or handed down to me, and some I had collected over the years; I also included one of my favorite foods.

There’s not so much of a story in each composition; these objects symbolize fragments of the past and of time a time in my life and through painting I am able to explore a more modern, less traditional approach to still life painting. In The Way To Keep Things Alive and Saving Things That Eventually Die I continue to paint portraits of women in kimonos signifying the influences I had growing up in a garments district but this time the women are holding and carrying objects, as if moving them from one place to another. It also signifies my attachment to my belongings that have sentimental value and transitioning into something unknown. In my other works I regenerate and continue to practice a more conceptual approach to portraiture by incorporating paper objects in my paintings.

My body of works still explores both autobiographical and conceptual approaches to art; still attempting to display the gaps and unpredictability of things, of life, of art; but instead of just looking back and referring to history I am looking forward to more unknown offerings and more transitions.

NIKKI OCEAN

House Warming

House Rules

Welcome dear guest,

Care for a snack? The kitchen is to the left. Please, feel at home. You seem pleasantly familiar So I’ll let you raid my refrigerator; and I’ll even share the bacon I brought home--given that I run on a full stomach myself. I’m not sorry for keeping sacred, the fire that fuels my belly.
You’re welcome to stay: an hour, a few days; forever? Granted that we stand a l o n e together.
Silence is served on a daily basis; if it does not suit your unrest, kindly leave.
Dining varies from the freshly baked to the left over, from takeout to slow-cooked meals, in the home to the street; my kitchen is nothing but mingled. Dearest guest, if your palate resists the bittersweet taste of adventure, then don’t occupy space in my living room. Coffee is always intoxicating.
I’ll slip into my intimates once in a while: disheveled hair and ragged pajamas, moods and melancholy. Those who mind must leave; and those who matter won’t.
House fixtures comprise of paint stains and motley music, a library, stacks of notes, seasoned objects, tools and tools, whimsy, and toil; film with soft lighting, and a flurry of blooms potted in soil. Kindly make room for treasure; it’s the only way to save space.
Please take down the picket fence around my perimeter; it cages the lush, and these flowers grow wild.
Last but not the least: keep off the art.

This house was built surreal. This is my home eternal. May you grace its floors with reverence.

FRANCIS COMMEYNE & CRIS MORA

Search Results

The Other Lives of Objects

Artists Francis Commeyne and Cris Mora mobilize customary sights and objects to direct us to other ways of knowing. Colored clay blocks, tarpaulin, and images of swimming pools are gathered in this space of viewing to deploy the mundane as cipher of contemporary life. They worked with readily found objects and images, convening them in ways that simultaneously reveal their ordinariness while signaling truths often ignored or denied. By producing an algorithm founded on seriality that can only be articulated by art’s ordering of things, the works surface the perennial disjuncture evident in city environments. It has become less useful to think of cities as just first- or third-worlds: one exists in the other. Most prosperous urban enclaves are ringed by slums, often the source of labour oiling the efficient machinery of development. Commeyne and Mora through a decontextualization of form and purpose point to more than the attributes of things art can reinvent. Color, composition, and cropping are the mechanics of rendition and at the same time, a diagnostic means. While these objects abound in everyday life, they are imbued rarity in an art setting. Altogether, they speak to structures founded on latent scarcity and pervasive inequality. At no other time in history are we most prosperous, yet the numbers suffering hunger is at a record high. At the core of this art making is a repurposing of not only objects but also knowledge work. It is a reconfiguration of knowledge that allows an expansive reading of the world and the possibilities of remaking it.

(Tessa Maria Guazon)

MARIANO CHING & YASMIN SISON

Does It Matter Who You Are?

Calamity reeks through the air. In every turn, a bombardment of issues and negativity seep through our every day. Mariano Ching and Yasmin Sison’s two-man exhibition “Does It Matter Who You Are?” is a series of portraits that seize the apprehensions and anxieties of living in today’s political climate. As though in deep breaths, paint turns into a receptacle for dispositions and hopes felt in this time of uncertainty. There is on one hand a set of fictional images exposing mangled forms against an otherwise natural landscape. Each abstracted figure makes manifest a sense of helplessness, anger and frustration, that is slightly subdued with a certain lightness in choice of tone and palette. This impressionistic motif becomes an entry point for articulations of awareness and sensations that persist beyond words.

On the other hand, realistic depictions of children on the cusp of adulthood pose with a confident nonchalance. Brought forth by an innocence and curiosity that is unburdened by the weight of society, an empowering quiet courage is seen through complicated looks that know and yet still hold a sense of optimism. While time remains on their hands at the moment, the truth of its passage is cleverly alluded to through the movement of water and the ephemerality of the bubbles. Portraiture goes beyond the figures that stand before them. The veracity that is captured is in the crevices, the little details, the stares and the shifts in color. Remedy is not provided for the gravity of these troubled times; instead, a sympathy in the stillness is carefully offered for a certain past and a future that we all hold onto.

(Iris Ferrer)

JUAN ALCAZAREN

The Last Things

There is something about the FINALE’ Art Gallery at the La Fuerza Compound along Pasong Tamo in Makati, Philippines that makes me feel that things are coming to an end. In 2011, I owned up to all mistakes ever made by installing a giant “SORRY” made with electric lights and found materials on the big wall of the Tall Gallery. The show’s title was Save me from what I want to save. The next year, 2012 (the year the world was supposed to end according to the Mayan prediction) I realized that enough was enough and mounted Juan Alcazaren’s Last Show in the Video Room. The room was painted black to signal the oblivion things were bound for.

This year, I have the only space I haven’t exhibited at yet at Finale’ – Upstairs. The Last Things will run from November 17 up to December 12. According to internet doomsday theories, Planet X, also called Nibiru will come out of hiding from the asteroid belt in our solar system and blind side the Earth in December 2017. Maybe third time is a charm and Finale will be ground zero. I guess we need to have a “closing” on the last day before the egress to end all egresses. All facetiousness aside, the title is from Christian Catholic eschatological teaching and refers to the last four things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. My faith falters at the drop of a hat and my spirituality is fraught with inconsistencies but by the Grace of my aspiration for higher things, I am able to continue continuing to be. All this can be freely associated with art and art making. Or not.

Juan Alcazaren

October 20, 2017

AYKA GO

Home: A Never-Never Land

An imaginary place where everything is pleasant or perfect in a way that is impossible to achieve in real life A childhood diary is a written record of life’s earliest memories. It preserves the critical bits and pieces of a person’s formative years: one’s way of thinking how a person sees the world, and how an individual gains an understanding of one’s self. The years I spent as a little girl were filled with whimsical imaginations, as the world of fairytales came alive in my young mind. I was fascinated by stories of princesses that I tried to be exactly like them as I created my own fantastic universe. This mental kingdom eventually dominated my world as I became convinced that magical things and creatures really did exist, blotting out the reality of pain and suffering.

While spending most of my growing up years around the house, I developed the habit of writing and drawing on my diary. The contents are both real and surreal. Now that I am no longer that child, going back and reading my childhood diary entries fascinates me –as if that child wasn’t me, a completely different human being. And that is why maybe I keep on going back and recreating my childhood memories- because everything seemed so perfect in my own little world back then. Now that I have grown, since I have seen and gained experiences, my eyes are now open to the realities of this world. Recreating my childhood is the only way I could reconnect to my own childhood self and world.

The show is inspired by the contents of my childhood diary and drawings when I was a child. Visualizing and representing them through painting and paper sculptures. The process includes reading, interpreting, reproducing, and recreating. I read and sort out the pages of the diary that I want to interpret then I scan to reproduce the pages of my childhood diary. Since the diary itself is private, by folding the pages of the diary, the contents are concealed and revealed all at the same time. It may not be read as a literary content but rather, seen as an object already.