West Gallery

Meet Your Meat

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:45:56 +0000

Felix Bacolor’s latest one-man show, entitled Meet Your Meat.

Documentation

Impermanent

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:37:04 +0000

In Impermanent, Gary Custodio shows us how recent natural catastrophes have changed the landscape that we knew. Destructive storms wrought havoc on countless lives and property, and, halfway around the world, the devastating earthquake in Haiti opened everyone’s eyes to the long, difficult, and perhaps even evasive road to recovery. Featured in the exhibit are four 4’ x 4’ works, done in acrylic on canvas, titled “Restart,” “Reminded,” “Reminded Again,” and “Imperfect,” respectively, and two 3’ x 4’ pieces. Though a watercolorist, Custodio chose to paint on canvas for this exhibit. “As much as possible, I wanted to retain the traits of watercolor, such as transparency, in my works.” The paintings are predominantly in bluish gray, earth, and metallic colors to represent earth, wind, fire, and water—elements that alternately give us life and threaten our existence. Custodio describes his works as “abstract visual representations of an aftermath or parts of what a whole used to be.” To him, they serve as reminders “that all things, and even life, are impermanent. They can be destroyed, or vanish in just a blink of an eye.” Hoping to mount an exhibit abroad someday, Custodio says he would likely use the same techniques in future shows, but is open to learning other approaches to show his versatility.

Documentation

Drawing To and Fro

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:36:06 +0000

Raul Rodriguez’s oil pastel drawings came from a series he started doing in the summer of 2004 when he was vacationing in Baguio. “Basically, the impulse to draw things, or to draw things from my head, started the series,” recalls Rodriguez on Drawing To and Fro, his latest one-man exhibit at West Gallery.

“At that time I was just thinking of art, and artworks I wanted to execute as paintings, but didn’t have the luxury of time to do them. So what I did, with oil sticks at hand, was to just make studies on Oslo paper,” Rodriguez explains, on finding inspiration. “Usually, the images I select (which incidentally were the ‘sparkplugs’ that drove me to think) were from existing pictures of paintings from art books and magazines. Some were from book covers; some were done by unknown artists, and some I happened to fancy as illustrations from magazines…It boils down to composition, or, as Miles Davis tried to reduce in simplest terms in his music, it’s a matter of balance. But the balance here maybe between the space between visual elements in the picture field, or the tension I create when I intentionally create an imbalance of object and subject. It’s capturing the moment when my imagined, preconceived visual pictured collides or interacts at the moment of drawing it. It’s like messing with the plan to make a new plan out of thin air which ideally must surprise me. I open myself to the accidental so that the spontaneous can speak through, too.”

He uses different hues and shades of pastel, drawing from impressionism, post-impressionism, and expressionism in mixing colors. Rodriguez notes, “We haven’t really fathomed what these -isms of art mean unless we investigate carefully what’s happening in the artists’ minds as well…The drawings may appear like oil paintings, and I like it that way, making drawings more permanent and stately in appearance than they really are.” He intends to show a handful of drawings that may appear unconnected to each other, making them more tentative yet making up a puzzle as a whole.

“For me, art’s newness redefines art in a new light or set of perspective…Painting can be an installation of forces emitted by objects or images we combine, and have a sudden eureka as a result. It helps a lot not to think about color and paint for a while…like art taking a vacation to see more art. The drawings represent memories on hindsight. It’s good to review what’s happening to me and my head when I did these drawings…These are like footprints, or traces of thoughts I wished were permanent and immortalized. But, like photographs, drawings on paper may serve as tools of memories of visual thoughts I find interesting, and not necessarily beautiful. Maybe I have accomplished something by just showing you the transient things I consider art.”

Documentation

ifisaysoifyouthinkso

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:50:15 +0000

Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg and Lawrence Weiner, who expressed their views on the meaning of art through their own works, Mawen Ong creates her own statement in her exhibit, titled, ifisaysoifyouthinkso. Held at West Gallery’s Gallery 1, it features eight 4 feet x 5 feet wall panels that are coated in beeswax and mixed with resin and pigment. Each panel, representing different art forms, is made of a single color, with words strung together as one word at the bottom, including “thisisapainting,” “thisisasculpture,” and “thisisaphotograph.” The panels coated in colored beeswax have a waxy finish, resembling flat surfaces of crayons. Just as Rauschenberg presented a telegram in which it read, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so,” and Weiner proclaiming in his 40-year retrospective exhibit, “This is art, if you think so,” Ong serves up intriguing declarations in her exhibit. To quote Roberta Smith of the New York Times in her review of Weiner’s work, “It also affirms that art ultimately triggers some kind of transcendence that can only be completed by the viewer.” Ong, who runs the artist space, Mo, concurs: “It took me over a year to refine and finalize the idea for this show. And it took over a month to make the entire 10 panels to complete the works. It will be up to viewers now what they will think [when they see the works].”

Documentation

Quiescence

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:50:02 +0000

In Quiescence, Erwin Leaño aims to create a series of paintings (in oil with acrylic under-painting on canvas) that suggests stillness and calmness. The composition, clearly indicating the foreground, middle ground, and background, features singular figures and objects that are set in a particular or suggested landscape. “I try to suggest the mood of the scene by adjusting the tones of the whole picture,” says Leaño, electing to use monochromatic browns. After working on three pieces, Leaño believes he has achieved what he initially visualized for Quiescence. He intends to continue exploring other aspects of this idea in future shows, while keeping it simple and quiet.

Documentation

2010: The Year We Make Contact

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:33:25 +0000

The parallels that can be drawn between art’s search for the elusive Other and man’s search for an equally elusive alien intelligence, metaphorical or otherwise, make sense, given how both are driven by similar impulses, scientific and spiritual and emotional, not least of which is the universal longing for a sense of wonder, if not necessarily truth, and the even more universal longing for contact.

It’s no coincidence that the junk iteration of art, the pulp sci-fic and comic books and B movies ,that has weaned and has been celebrated and exhaustively fetishized to mine their aesthetic by the rotating group of artists - - - Ronald Achacoso, Alex Aguilar, Daphne Aguilar, Felix Bacolor, Dodo Dayao, Raul Rodriguez, Miko Sandejas, Omar Taleon and Cris Villanueva - - -is voracious with alien life, with a densely populated universe, with the ubiquity of cosmic others.

2010: The Year We Make Contact is the third in a trilogy of group shows begun with 2007’s Destroy All Monsters and with 2008’s Them! that meditates on close encounters and all its diametric permutations: evidence and mystery, contact and disconnect, presence and isolation.

2010: The Year We Make Contact runs from Jan 12 to February12 ,2010 at the West Gallery on 48 West Avenue.

Documentation

Out of Focus

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:32:53 +0000

Artist Fernan Escora sticks with tackling social issues in his new exhibit, titled Out of Focus. “Every time you read the papers or watch the news, there are always new issues that we have to deal with,” notes Escora on the many headline-grabbing problems plaguing our society today that inspired his latest series of works. He adds that all his exhibits are related; he just introduces new elements to fit his theme, and uses recurring ones to make all the pieces appear as one large work. In the 2 x 4 ft piece titled “Out of Focus,” he concentrates on overlapping eyes as a major element in the composition, along with human figures and clouds. “Eyes can see things. Without it, it is not easy to recognize anything. It also helps you focus, or keep you out of focus [if you choose to stay out of focus].” Escora continues, “An artist can use any medium he wants. He can play with it, improve on it, or experiment with it. At the end, what is important is the product of his work…The artist should not limit himself to one medium, nor conform to any standard medium. What matters is being able to think and create according what he believes is important and sensible.”

Documentation

Negative Light

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:28:53 +0000

Olan Ventura, fresh off an exhibit in Singapore, returns with Negative Light, a telling depiction of vice and deviance in society. Ventura displays such breakaways from social convention in “negative mode,” playing with the tonal inversions of his subjects’ light and dark areas. Inspired by conversations he’s held with people who work in nightclubs and bars, Ventura notes that the themes presented in his works are really happening and that he is painting them as he saw them. Culled from studies of “positive” images, Ventura reverses them into X-ray-like images where viewers could see them in a different light, and then revealing them as the original positive images through a video presentation. He says that he didn’t need to make any new adjustments in the approach; he just needed to find a reason, an outlet in which he could interpret these “taboo” situations, including a large-scale installation of cigarette butts made from plastic resin and acrylic paints. “I try to discover what is new to me, what I learned from my experiences and the experiences of other people,” says Ventura.

Documentation

Yesterday

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:28:20 +0000

Manok Ventura, who is exhibiting his works in Gallery 2, draws inspiration from unpleasant experiences and transforms them into aesthetic masterpieces on canvas. Titled “Yesterday,” the exhibit aims to bring the beauty out of the ugly, reversing and restating those undesirable events into works of art, and inviting viewers “look beyond what the naked eye can see.”

Documentation

Voyage

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:27:38 +0000

In Voyage, Roma Valles presents five works in oil that depict man’s journey through life. Painting large-scale everyday scenes and images in realistic, photo-like detail, Valles notes that each of the five pieces “shows a parallelism to everyday challenges and circumstances that we go through.” One of the works, titled “Next in Line” (oil on canvas, 36” x 72”), features a woman waiting in line. “It is a part of life,” observes Valles. “We react to it differently, and how we react to it, patiently or not, gracefully or not, ends up uniquely as a result of our actions.” In “Options,” Valles takes us to a parking lot where there are two cars parked, as if the drivers chose to be early birds. Then, there is “5 a.m. (oil on canvas, 48” x 48”),” where we only see a silhouette of a woman routinely walking through the dark at 5 in the morning. “It shows that familiarity can make our daily lives flow flawlessly, or it may also mean that familiarity can make things very boring.” Valles provides the setting in which viewers can come up with their own stories as the images presented mirror everyday circumstances.