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The first thing that strikes you when you enter the Looking For Juan (L4J) art space (Serendra, Taguig City) for the Mga Kuwentong EDSA exhibit is how familiar the images on both the small and large canvasses are, with faces and figures both real and abstract that speak of a time we might be too young to remember. But the icons / slogans / colors continue to have currency. Two artists are part of this exhibit, from different generations, both working with… Continue reading »
The failure happens first on the level of being disallowed to take photos in the Ayala Museum, something that’s even stranger when the exhibit is purportedly about people power, and yet the people aren’t allowed to take photos anywhere in that museum, a reminder really of why I’ve stopped going there. It took an exhibit like Revolution Revisited (Ayala Museum, Makati City now up at on a mall and campus tour) by photographer Kim Komenich to make me step foot… Continue reading »
We know the value of the moving picture, and I shall not begin on the kind of cinema / film / industry that the access to this technology has meant in the more impoverished nations of this world from which independence has meant more creative films. Of course even that, at least in our shores, is beginning to be the exception instead of the rule. At the Singapore Biennale 2011, the moving picture, the camera itself, is focused on things… Continue reading »
The past two years of going around art exhibits and events have taught me two things. One, no matter how much I love a work of art, I will never be able to afford it. Such is the tragedy of my writing about art: spectatorship isn’t ownership unless I delude myself into thinking exactly that. Two, pre-exhibit write-ups aren’t my cup of tea. Many people are trained and/or like this kind of writing; I feel like it impedes upon my spectatorship… Continue reading »
1. let me begin with this: 2. how is it that this is NOT the We Are Not Aimless exhibit? nope, none of those paintings are part of it, not that gallery set-up, nothing. how does this even make sense? 3. i was at your gallery for close to an hour, even used the comfort room while there, and three of your gallery people saw me. NONE of them told me i was looking at the wrong exhibit, or the right exhibit… Continue reading »
these were up elsewhere that i love because they are untouched, unexpurgated, and i’m left to fawn or freak out and everything in between. art can only be about how it makes you feel eh? (1) Pilipinas Street Plan at the Lopez Museum’s Extensions. (2) The end of the art world via Kin Misa’s rust and color. (3) J Pacena’s After Mall Hours. (4) the Pinoy toy as art form and mythmaking. (1)
ambassador. — noun. 1. a diplomatic official of the highest rank, sent by one sovereign state to another as its resident representative. (via dictionary.com) granted that diplomacy is what Boy Abunda has plenty of and “his ability to communicate ideas” is the soundbite that’s suppose to explain why he’s been appointed as Arts Ambassador. of course there are so many other people who do this just as well if not better: i can give you 10 names off the top… Continue reading »
The display window of Heima Store in LRI Design Plaza is all about Arlene Sy’s first exhibit of hand-drawn illustrations. Entitled Inflated Dreams, this collection couldn’t be ignored despite its small size of five pieces. It might have been the delicate colours and lines of the works, or maybe it was the fact that it played around with the image of balloons, and women. Maybe it’s all of the above. Light Headed Inflated wear Two works seem cliché in their… Continue reading »
The cube as a form seems limited enough: put something inside it, paint each side of it and tadah! it’s a work of art. But in Cube at the Tall Gallery of Finale Art File (Pasong Tamo, Makati City) curated by Nilo Ilarde, the cube is revealed in all its possibilities, my only complaint is that there was too much. Fill it up, or paint it on! In Cube filling up the cube didn’t mean being uncreative. One only has to… Continue reading »
It’s easy to be distracted by how pretty the works of Catalina Africa are in The Etymology of Disaster (West Gallery, West Avenue, Quezon City). The work that welcomes you to the exhibit after all, is a collage of black and white photos of sunsets, reminiscent of and invoking romance, the kind that we all know off. The letters that spell “departure” in bold bright pink letters makes it seem like both sunsets and disasters are happy. This dynamic between… Continue reading »
note: a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Arts and Books section, 20 September 2010. After last year it was difficult not to look forward to ManilArt 2010. Last year meant drinks and music, a whole lot of camaraderie, a certain high to having such a huge event for Philippine art happen. This year, while the art was there in fantastic display, there seemed to be an amount of distance between art and people. Maybe there just… Continue reading »
a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Arts and Books Section, August 23 2010. Because Mark Salvatus and his work inspired by the Quezon Provincial Jail would be the most logical choice for the Ateneo Art Award 2010, to this critic who has seen most these artists’ exhibits when they came out in galleries and museums across the metro, and who does insist on relevance and resistance, and its possibilities in art. Of the 12 short-listed… Continue reading »
a version of this is in the Arts and Books Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 9 2010. From afar, the first thing you notice about Ruben de Jesus’ works is its colors. Reds, blues and blacks are rendered in various and unexpected hues that play around with light and shadow and emphasis. Up close, each of the pen and ink works is a story in itself, at the same time that all together they could be bound into one… Continue reading »
The one thing that resonates about Juan Sajid Imao’s recent work is its pain, and how this seamlessly intertwines with strength in black and red brass sculptures that make up Open Endings (Net Quad, Deutsche Knowledge Services Lobby, presented by Project Art and 1/off). In a country where sculptors are few and far between, most of who work on the universal notions of humanity and being Pinoy, there was something strikingly different about Imao’s work here. And no, it isn’t… Continue reading »
a version of this was published in the Arts and Books Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 21 2010. In May 1898, Apolinario Mabini wrote his Dekalogo, a list which reconfigures the 10 commandments into one that does not forget nation or nationalism. In May 2010, CANVAS’ Dekalogo (Vargas Museum, U.P. Diliman) forces us all to remember just that. And in the context of an election just done with and a new government ready to change our lives, it… Continue reading »
a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 31 2010. It is everything and fantastic this CANVAS project that is Looking For Juan. After all, the overwrought discussion of identity seems to be at a dead-end, where insisting on Filipino-ness is adjudged too nativist and always anti-America. This forgets that when we insist on being part our colonizers, there seems to be a refusal to deal with looking at our identities as separate still from these… Continue reading »
Not quite impressed with the valentine exhibit at Manila Contemporary in February – save for Angelo Suarez’s “Not the Object, But the Energy It Consumes Over Time” and Rachel Rillo’s “Keep It Taut” – I was ready to be disappointed in the I Love You exhibit at Hiraya Gallery (530 UN Avenue, Ermita, Manila). But I was impressed, at the works that were there, bound together by the idea and act of saying “I loveyou”. The sculptures should’ve been an… Continue reading »