Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
Kim Oliveros
Neil de la Cruz
Rocelie Delfin
GINO BUEZA
Half Full Half Sorry
Painting can be beautiful yet also agonizing. It is a container, a receptacle of your daily
routine, ideas, mistakes, and muscle memory hoping they would somehow congeal into
a language that you form in the studio. In the process, you begin to stutter and end in
glossolalia - chasing where a line could lead, what a dot could be, what shape might
emerge. But what is it then that you’re chasing?
Expanding his assembly line of materials and quips, at full display is Gino Bueza’s
lexicon at work: the juxtaposition of print and paint, layered with color and gestures,
“Half Full Half Sorry” gives us a front seat into an experience of how it feels like when
you stop and finally try to catch your breath. A breath that becomes a moment, an
opportunity to pause, to notice, to be aware, to live, and not take life too seriously. An
invitation to stay curious, look closer, step further, and see things in more ways than
one.
The artist approaches the process of painting “with eyes closed and an open heart”
where jitters and false starts eventually “dissolve into a string of curiosities and
unfiltered decisions.” It becomes “a quest, filled with hopes, looking for a certain feeling,
never about its meaning.” A reminder that to create something takes courage.
Repeating itself but never like so are pattern-printed grids set against stark contrasts of
colored bands and shapes and overlaid with collage elements standing out underneath
layers of translucent washes maximized within a series of large canvases like “Little
ants carrying big things.” There is an overlap or “layering contrasts of fluidity and
flatness,” a reconfiguration of sorts happens as rhythm catches the artist working. This
rhythm is then caught in shifting states as each small, yet intimate canvas work
becomes an integral part of the artist’s practice like meditative journal entries and as
screenshots that over time accumulate “as traces paired with overlapping chances and
decisive actions” are subconsciously added into an even more extensive visual
vocabulary.
Intersecting across the canvas, silhouettes of brushes and fishes fill the space as Yin is
to Yang, as they emerge from the mind’s eye. Referencing how ideas are like fish
waiting to be captured, describing the creative process swimming in different directions
that create ripples from one canvas to the next following the ebbs and flows of one’s
intuition.
Lifted from the term and halted within the bounds of the canvas, in “Air Quotes (AB-EX)”
we see bold balloon shaped letters form Bueza’s text play, using AB-EX in a tongue-in
cheek way abbreviated from Abstract Expressionism, inverted as EX-AB or perhaps to
be deconstructed, interrupted by a translucent overlay of colored digital typeface
cascading like Tetris pieces that fill the space. The spaces within each painting are
intuitively yet decisively filled by unique picture elements or what’s commonly known aspixels whether made from a screenprint, a stencil, or an ice cube tray which also
doubles as the artist’s mixing plate with each creating a unique pattern or configuration.
Squint and perhaps you’ll see things more clearly. Swipe left or take a step back and
ask yourself again. The works in the exhibit become a metaphor for breathing. The
various dimensions in scale, the maximal and minimal, we breathe in and breathe out.
What then gives more meaning to the fullness would be its counterpart wherein sorry
isn’t a placeholder for empty but becomes something that is acknowledged rather than
rejected. Bold and unapologetic. Sorry, not sorry.
​
-Mai Saporsantos
VALERIE CHUA
A Record of Looking
In an age defined by the relentless production and circulation of images, Valerie Chua turns her attention toward those that seem to belong to no one in particular. Drawn from the vast and ceaseless accumulation of visual culture, the images in this exhibition are selected precisely because they bear no personal affiliation to the artist. They become a test of looking itself: what happens when observation is directed toward images stripped of attachment, memory, or biography?
Having chosen them, Chua subjects these fragments of visual culture to the concentrated labor of painting. The process is neither straightforward translation nor faithful reproduction. Through careful acts of selection, emphasis, omission, and cropping, she determines where attention should settle and where it should falter. Some images are truncated; others remain deliberately unfinished. Such gestures mirror the conditions from which these images emerge—detached from context, severed from narrative, encountered as isolated visual events whose origins remain inaccessible.
Yet detachment does not result in coldness. If anything, Chua pursues the emotional residue that images carry despite their anonymity. Through passages of hypersaturated color and luminous surfaces, the paintings evoke a peculiar nostalgia untethered from lived experience. They seem suspended within a vacuum of time, recalling memories that may never have belonged to us in the first place. At moments, the works appear as though they are still coming into being, as if the images are developing before our eyes and have not yet settled into fixed form.
Installed together, the paintings resist continuity. They do not cohere into a singular story or thematic sequence. Instead, they offer a series of visual ruptures: a family photograph with the mother's head abruptly cut off, a dead bird, and other seemingly ordinary images that oscillate between familiarity and estrangement. Meaning emerges not through narrative connection but through the gaps that separate one image from another.
Painting has long carried the assumption that its subjects are chosen out of personal significance—that the artist paints what matters to them. Chua unsettles this expectation. Rather than approaching her subjects through intimacy or identification, she adopts a position of deliberate remove, allowing the discipline of painting to encounter images outside her immediate sphere of interest. In doing so, the paintings become meditations not on the subjects themselves but on the condition of imagehood. These anonymous fragments of visual culture, detached from origin and ownership, become the objects of the artist's sustained and unreserved devotion.
-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
GERICHO LAYANTE
Imahinasyon at Inspirasyon: Kanlungan ng Gunita
When Gericho Layante finishes and sees his works, he can’t imagine how he was able to come up with these kinds of works. He used to have a hard time making them. In his show entitled Imahinasyon at Inspirasyon: Kanlungan ng Gunita, he combines imagination and inspiration. Imagination and inspiration motivated him to make his works. The imagination of his work is the characteristics of the cartoons, which play in his mind while he watched people in the bukid, back in the province. Inspiration comes from his amazement with his idol Fernando Amorsolo, who serves as his light while he paints.
The show is about going back to childhood and memories of a simple yet happy life in the province. The works’ colors show the beauty of childhood, from playing under trees, the neighbor’s conversations, and life near the environment. His works show a time when one doesn’t think of the heaviness of the world. The colorful characters and their elements come from the imagination. They show how childhood shaped Gericho’s views and dreams. The mix of reality and fantasy symbolize the innocence of the thoughts of a child who grew up in the province. A world full of color, questions, and never ending imagination.
Gericho’s painting process starts with thinking of a concept coming from life in the province of Batangas, where he grew up. He also thinks about Amorsolo’s works and the cartoon characters. These are included in the concept of the artwork. He starts drawing on scratch paper and once he comes up with a concept he draws on canvas. He continues his work with the underpainting technique.
He uses oil paint and a canvas to paint because he mastered using these mediums. His works took inspiration from Fernando Amorsolo who Gericho idolizes ever since he started painting. With the help of his college professor, he was able to find his art style. His style is inspired by Amorsolo’s works, fun cartoons that play in his mind, his experiences since his childhood in the province, his dream of becoming a painter, and the farmers and people from the province.
​
-Mica Sarenas