Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
GERARDO TAN
As It Happens All Things Connect Without a Prompt: the Evolution of The Shape of Memory and The Sound of a Thing of Its Own Unmaking
Diving into the unknown is the task of art. Not knowing brings a measure of anxiety and fear that afflicts even the best of us; where this uncertainty fills that important need for discovery - a desire to seek connections near impossible in order to take that leap of faith over the absurd. In Gerardo Tan’s installation of sculpture and video entitled “The Shape of Memory,” a person is digging into the earth for no reason but with successive shovel swings looks as if to breach the proverbial other end of the world. At a certain point rather, the digging stops. The point was to rely on experiential data to develop it into another form: to measure the pit with the body as a recording entity towards an intuition of space - a gestural space akin to painting where one needs only about a couple inches to touch and sense the corporeality of its own being, to make a mark that emerges from below. Tan had asked the digger to recreate this event by sculptural means while using the same clay soil he had dug from - a remembrance of things past that led to its becoming as the shape of memory lived through a certain space. The work consists of free standing sculptural vestibules of various sizes each containing a video that echoes the event. If we were to imagine what lies within this vacuum in comparison to that space between the ears, and if so, this is where our thoughts presumably would be as the essential mind. This form would be empty and this emptiness is form. Tan is fascinated by this never ending cycle of being and non-being, the recto verso, as above and so below of all things that can be seen throughout his works.
“The sound of a thing of its own unmaking” transforms a gong from its full-rounded metallic mass into a flattened sheet emptied of its acoustical role. This work deconstructs tight cultural tropes into wide open aesthetic expression, releasing not just the haunt of custom but also the ties of labor to material and to that of value - an abstraction of sorts that embodies the historical materialist notion of “all that is solid turns into air.” What remains from this metamorphosis is the infinite mantra of constant pounding information, that for both things being relative - mass equivalent to its energy with one form concentrated while the other is free, information travels faster than form.
Hence, relative beauty found in everything means simple things are also beautiful, wherein art’s apparent purposive purposelessness travels far into the terrain of the sublime. In “Seismic Map 1,” Tan paints a portrait of the moving landscape and explores mark making, delineating the path towards higher ground. His process of automatic drawing, the hand holding a marker while the journey draws itself, produces a cognitive tattoo etched according to seismic suggestion.
Other visible rhythms in transformative flux include a video installation that features a native Madukayan chanter, where Tan translates the song by drawing with his tongue, mapping musical notations of pitch and duration codified from sound to vision. Another hybridized expression entitled “Flatscreen” involves an electronic transmission filtered through the traditional media of painting and textile weaving. According to Tan, the work epitomizes the liminal space of abstraction indicative of the “glitch” between seeing and knowing, or if not, the disparity between high and low. This inquiry on representation is succeeded by the video work of “Sunrise and Sunset” involving a recording of the slow rise of dough, and also in reverse, over a topology of opened art books. Beyond this tongue-in-cheek rendition of the everyday that tests interpretation, the artist questions levels of abundance and scarcity gathered from nature that are troubled by the issues of culture. Ultimately, Tan presents a modest box reflective of the outside where one can peer inside to find clues on identity and authenticity, bearing the question of “Who are you?” that touches upon our media saturated reality.
As it happens, Gerardo Tan’s conceptual project of transforming the immanent potentiality existing within materials and in translation of content towards a revitalized symbolism, where new significance emerges from this recomposition, approaches the wonder of alchemical magic under the spectacle of art, which, in the age of deferred human responses and generative prompts that acquiesce to the power of machine learning, the comforts of automatic services, or the requisite speed of modern life, leaves not enough room for time, nor play, and the wherewithal to preserve the scarcity of human experience that inspires us, and perhaps to dream.
-Arvin Flores
RODOLFO GAN
PRISM 4
In PRISM 4, Rodolfo Gan presents a suite of new works that extends what has become his signature motif: the dimensionality of geometric abstraction.
Much of the development of geometric abstraction has been toward the flattening of shapes and colors, until they coincide entirely with the pictorial plane. Gan, however, asks what might happen when these visual elements are choreographed not merely across a surface but within it. His paintings create layers, depth, and a sense of interiority, transforming what appear to be simple geometric forms into spaces that seem to contain themselves.
Central to this process is Gan’s use of the airbrush, which allows him to produce gradual shifts in color toward either opacity or transparency. These gradations effectively “frame” his monolithic forms, intensifying the illusion that they are confined within, or emerging from, a three-dimensional space. Color therefore becomes not simply an attribute of the shape but an instrument for constructing its spatial presence.
Yet for all their apparent monumentality, Gan’s forms are not static. They seem to vibrate, sally forth, spiral, or cascade. This dynamism is produced by the complexity of the planar surfaces, which appear to shift according to where perception lands: what first reads as a hollow plane may suddenly become a jutting surface, and vice versa. In this regard, Gan’s geometric abstraction is essentially optical—an op-art that activates the eye as much as it occupies the wall.
The paintings’ surfaces may appear smooth, precise, even industrial, but Gan allows small imperfections to enter the otherwise rigorous geometry. Slightly chipped or corrugated edges interrupt the perfection of the forms, reminding us that these are made objects rather than immaculate propositions. Such imperfections introduce a distinctly human element into a visual language otherwise given to precision and control.
This language extends into Gan’s sculptures, both wall-bound and freestanding. His fundamental shapes—the square, triangle, and circle—interlock to produce architectural configurations, their geometries reiterated by the stainless-steel structures on which they are mounted. Here, the distinction between painting and sculpture becomes increasingly porous: the illusion of depth in the paintings acquires physical presence, while the sculptural works retain the logic of the pictorial plane.
PRISM 4 ultimately allows us to appreciate an abstraction that traffics in the realm of three-dimensionality. It demonstrates how the merest visual elements—line, plane, shape, color—can become the ground for increasingly complex constructions, cantilevering the mind toward spaces that are at once organized and evocative, rational and perceptually unstable.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
LOU LIM
Mending - An Opening
Lou Lim starts this series of works by tracing crevices—"openings"—off a public roadway, and transferring them onto canvas. The painstaking process then ensues as the artist “closes the openings” using embroidery by hand—sewing slowly, repetitively, a couple of millimeters at a time to visually translate the varying degrees of depth of these fractures into the tones of the thread.
The finished embroidery is mounted onto the gallery wall as if embedded into the concrete itself, surrounding its contours with a thick skin of paint, made out of layers upon layers of white paint, simulating the edges of the cracks. On closer inspection, the work begins to shift between two visual registers: the intimate image of scabs forming over wounds and the expansive contours of a topographic landscape.
The artist's intent is clear in the chosen process of hand embroidery. Mending, beyond its physicality and materiality, entails mental and physical endurance, consistency and restraint. Force and speed create knots and spirals; measured hand movements create directed lines and defined patterns.
Lou Lim weaves together materially opposing dimensions – the hardness of construction, and the softness of embroidery, both materially associated with the act of Mending.
Apart from construction and textiles, the Body is another significant recipient of Mending. It is a site of continuous restoration, tending, and healing. Another set of works includes sculptures made by casting body parts of her and her family using plaster bandages – a material that aids injuries as openings or fractures “close” [or mend]. This set of works shows various casts of knees with stitches directly sewn into the plaster that portray key words used during the process of creating the work that imitate the tradition of signing a cast with “get well messages.”
Mending semantically obtains its meaning only when juxtaposed with something broken—something that was formerly whole. The need to Mend, therefore, reveals a brokenness: the loss of a former wholeness. And while some cracks on walls are superficial, certain tears in fabric negligible, and some cuts on skin forgettable, there are fractures in structures, frays in textiles, and ruptures in skin that point to a deeper, systemic failure.
Mending is inextricably woven in the various facets of human experience, allowing the works to oscillate between the micro and macro dimensions of healing: the personal and collective, the physical and spiritual, the private and public.
In the act of Mending, there exists the desire to return to something's original integrity. But is there truly a return? Or does mending tell the story of an opening that once was—and what it could now be?
-Faith Cao