For this exhibit at West Gallery, the artist picks up where he left off using enamel as medium. During college, Ernest dealt with Pinoy pop culture, using kitschy references like jeepney stickers and street art to make witty, acerbic statements for his junior thesis. He chose enamel to replicate the vinyl-like texture and saccharine colors of the jeepney sticker-aesthetic.

Still highly evident in these new works is Ernest’s fondness for visual puns. For instance, his BRB Christ painting, an offshoot of his previous work OMG Christ, is directly inspired by chat-speak yet draws largely on traditional religious paintings for visual reference.

The exhibit will feature a dozen enamel on canvas paintings of varying dimensions. The artist continues to draw inspiration from Filipino culture including religious icons and product labels. Ernest further explores the materiality of enamel paint by pouring it directly on a stretched canvas laid flat. The spills and drips and textures created using this painting technique may seem arbitrary, but the way the artist “herds” the paint without using traditional paint brushes to conform to the images on canvas is nothing short of impressive.

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Cabangis draws from as many references as he could, from real-life situations to movies. He notes, “Even when I am at rest physically, my mind isn’t. There are so many scenes playing in my mind where I constantly examine myself and my actions. Would things have turned out differently if I chose to do something else on that particular day?” He points out a scene in the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Brad Pitt, as “Benjamin Button,” was thinking back to the day “Daisy,” Cate Blanchett’s character, figured in an accident that forced her to quit dancing, and how she could have avoided the accident if she just did things slightly differently at the time.

In Would That It Were, Cabangis tries to use the same reflective approach, this time, drawing images and narratives from his experiences with family members to match the intimacy of the gallery space. Two pieces feature the portraits of his parents, in which he toys with the idea of “what if their paths never crossed and never met.”
Meanwhile, Cabangis is aware of the challenges and the unpredictability of emulsion transfer as an art-making process. “You’re always thinking how to correct the ‘mistakes,’ and wondering how the finished product would look like. I just deal with it spontaneously, with very little planning.”

“I enjoy doing it because it is like unwrapping a gift. You don’t really know how it would turn out in the end. I can also multi-task, where I can do several pieces simultaneously using different techniques,” shares Cabangis, a fine arts graduate from the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

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We are frightened of forgetting.

There is a desperation to herd every scrap of memory we have and lock them up in the boxcars of social media platforms, to freeze every sunset and moonrise and planetary wobble, to regurgitate every great meal into byte-sized photos. We facebook our friends and foursquare our footfalls. We tweet and tumble, flick and link, blog, bing, broadcast and podcast our every waking thought.

In One in Mind, Winner Jumalon allows us access to his own external memories. Functioning as artist and archivist, he pores over past conversations, letters, and pictures to create paintings as reservoirs of memory. However, the works subvert the modern-day urge to compile information into well-ordered stacks; while we hoard our memories of others and preserve them in row upon row of digital mausoleums, Winner attempts to distill the essence of his relationships by manipulating image, background, and narrative into one painting per persona.

The whole of art can be said as extensions of memory, of course. When man made the first images, we invented a way to store memory outside of our minds. Think about every scene, portrait, figurine, and monument as an actual and metaphorical connection to a memory. Abstract mental and emotional symbols alchemize into physical objects. Art can be viewed as parallel to memory, artist Andrea Polli states in Virtual Space and the Construction of Memory. Both employ and integrate the senses, both are representations.

In creating the painting as a representation of memory, Winner takes it further by exploring its associative nature. He starts with hard evidence of the others’ existence, gathering actual pictures, letters, and online messages sent to him by the personas in his painting. In the long chain of correspondence, he selects key character elements then starts representing them, letting one element trigger another and so on, until the completed work becomes a protean but potent reconstruction of the past.

In Perla, he takes a tagged Facebook message and photo sent by a previous helper about winning an Iglesia ni Cristo dance and spins off by incorporating text of the Visayan narrative, a new physical body for his subject, and the architecture of Old Zamboanga City. In Lolo Chuding, he takes a 2011 handwritten letter and a 1991 photo of his maternal grandfather who narrates having re-established a watch repair shop and reconstructs it into a background of clocks, forming deist parable of genetic heritage. In Lampu Kansanoh, he recalls a souvenir and dedication from Thailand with the young Thai artist and gives us the details of this intimate conversation.

Perhaps the most intriguing painting in the series sheds light on the 6-year correspondence between Winner and Pachingguel Hortillanos, whose recent retrospective at the Manila Contemporary made news when he burned a hole on his own painting with a lighted cigar. The playful aggression between the young upstart and the old eccentric is evident; it starts with Pachingguel admonishing the artist about his lack of history, and Winner’s snapshot is a response evoking the buried tension between generations.

The paintings in One in Mind are not memorials but memory palaces – remnant structures of the mind from the Greeks who devised them as powerful visual methods of remembering. They are Winner Jumalon’s meandering, mnemonic shorthand of each of the lives that have once been a part of his.

History is written according to the Winner

(by Ben Buendia)

In his 2012 exhibit One in Mind, Winner Jumalon started by re-appropriating postcard kitsch using Facebook as an image pool to form mind maps of friends, family, and acquaintances. In this personal ordering of his stream of experiences, he wanted to show how memory detaches itself and warps into different forms, to challenge the present-day notion that it can be compartmentalized and filed away by the technologies at our disposal.

What followed, however, was a complete stretching of memory into fiction.

In 1971, the cave-dwelling Tasaday were discovered to have a technology level that never evolved beyond the Stone Age because they were utterly isolated from society. The Tasaday lived in typical houses and wore t-shirts and jeans. National Geographic dubbed them noble savages; they were celebrities shown in documentaries and visited by celebrities. A government official convinced them to be pretend prehistorics, promising them aid and payment which never came.

In his latest series, Winner overlays his subjects with scribbled narratives. We are hungry for biography, so we believe him when he reveals these correspondences with other people. It’s de rigueur at an age where social media doubles as a confessional booth.

However, what he does is to pervert the intimate nature of the postcard to create false realities. He sets them up convincingly enough with familiar faces and tropes: the quirky Visayan helper, former art mentors with whom he has lost touch, the father transformed into the invincible hero of his childhood. The truth is not out there; it does not lie in the intrinsic nature of the artwork, but in the number of people that’s persuaded to believe in it.

A year after YouTube launched, a video blogger called Lonelygirl15 started uploading funny clips that got her noticed. She was an actress named Jessica Rose hired to be part of a web-based experimental show. When she posted a video about being upset that her religion did not allow her to do things other kids did, she had gathered half a million views within 48 hours and the following of numerous netizens interested in her life story.

One in Mind’s subterfuge begins to unravel with the artist’s inclusion of certain personas in the series: a deceased grandfather whom he purports to have had received a letter from dated last year, an intimate exchange with a celebrated Thai artist whom he has never met, and his fictional correspondence with the self-proclaimed Artist of the Century Pachingguel Hortillanos, a complete invention with his own backstory – Winner’s foray into the novelist’s territory.

The “aha” moment may be subtle but when it happens, the curtains are suddenly pulled down and every other piece is suspect. We are denied our voyeurism, but are instead asked to transform our original misreading into a more active engagement with the nature of art and reality. Winner plants the seedlings of confusion here and there, and they rise to destabilize certainty and inspire a questioning of our era’s overflow of biographical information.

Sir Francis Bacon was wrong when he said that knowledge is power. In an age where the amount of digital information has now reached a zettabyte (the equivalent of watching 36 million years of HD video) and anyone, anyone can add another drop to this deluge, what have we truly gained?

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“I always consider the physical space where a painting will hang,” adds Cabigting. “When I was given a schedule to exhibit at West Gallery, I knew right away to take the wall that was behind glass, which made sense because the Mona Lisa at the Louvre is behind protective glass.”

Doing “back of painting” works can be such a meticulous process, requiring Cabigting to pursue intensive research and readings. But Cabigting, a confessed recluse, isn’t complaining. She’s happy with being able to mount an average of two shows a year.

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Lee himself is not your typical, brooding maestro. A fine arts graduate from the University of the Philippines, he does not hide behind the technical jargon of his craft. Instead, he talks about his approach so casually and with such wit like it is so easy and natural anyone with a paintbrush could do it. But nobody could paint the way he does, and see the world like he does. An avid fan of music (and decades-old audio equipment and other second-hand items), Lee compares painting to writing music and his body of work to a musician’s discography. And as you look at each piece closely, the strokes seem to flow as melodically as if it were the visual soundtrack to Lee’s colorful, eventful life.

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Sam Kiyoumarsi presents us with a series of images that signify the weaving of despair into monuments of anxious liberation, using the infinite wrap of the graphic mark to align with the depth of existence.

text by Arvin Flores

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He is most fascinated with the multi-layering of colors in different tonal values and textures. In a sense, it is almost similar to making sculptures on paper. Cordero says the meticulous handiwork that goes into each work is like cross stitching, from the initial “chaos” of trying to put together individual elements to reaching a certain level of “order” and “calm” in the final composition. He appreciates the freedom to which he can explore the magnitude of imagery before him, and the importance of collage as the foundation of the big picture he is creating.

“Welcome Spiritualist Camp” draws inspiration from the futurist art of the early 20th century, as Cordero works out the details of his images through carefully chosen lines, shapes, and colors to portray idyllic scenes. Here, he is not concerned with a specific narrative flow, but rather he is focused on striking a balance among his formalistic ideas. Instead of using figures, he goes for harder, more definite shapes to show his willingness to try new styles and move forward as an artist, as he does in “Hello, Africa, tell me what you’re doing” and in “”Gabba Gabba Hey.” He loves to play with words as much as he does with his art materials.

To Cordero, the constant process of problem-solving to arrive at a desired result motivates him to continue painting and to learn new techniques and approaches in a way that keeps him and his audience interested.

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