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White is what greets you when you enter the gallery that’s been transformed into a playground by Manolo Sicat’s Matayataya. The first reaction is one of joy: the kind that play allows, no matter how old we get, especially because it is reminiscent of the kids that we were when the streets were safe to play in. But it sinks in soon enough: play here is everything and violent, because the streets have changed, because the streets are now testament to… Continue reading »
and how art criticism fails in this country. stop talking to the artists! start looking at their work! The endless gaze in Digging In The Dirt In literature we always say the author is dead, a convenient and highly questionable concept really that allows the reader a pretense of reading only the text, ignoring as much as possible the notion of the writer as center of truth. In reviewing art, it still seems like a contradiction to do an interview with… Continue reading »
we don’t. but let me give you some proof. Enjoy Division is a group exhibit not just with a wonderful title, but which had a curatorial note by Antares Gomez Bartolome that the Light&Space Contemporary gallery decided to put down. the said note was critical of Malaysian curator Adeline Ooi’s assessment of Philippine contemporary art which looked down on us, i.e., “We already know you were conquered by the Spanish, sold to the Americans, raped by the Japanese and totally fucked… 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 »
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 »
via thepoc.net’s Metakritiko section. I don’t know Angelo Suarez, Gelo, personally, but I appreciate his (virtual) presence in the way that I tend to love every other person who has the gall/temerity/balls man/woman/gay to speak his mind even when it’s unpopular. The thing is, there was nothing unpopular about Gelo’s review of Pablo Gallery’s Chabet, Tan, Ilarde exhibit.In fact, knowing the kind of consciousness Gelo brings to art, this was a pretty good review – good, being, he liked the exhibit… Continue reading »
We are told many things about being an artist, one of which is that you must start young. The other is that there’s no money in it, unless you’re one of the lucky ones who ends up having a fixed market for your art, or the one to whom money doesn’t matter. Jane Arietta-Ebarle doesn’t fall under any of these categories. In fact, she falls nowhere near them. This isn’t just because she has come into painting again only after… Continue reading »
It is difficult not to be happy at 1/Off Gallery when Farley del Rosario’s works are on display. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t the simple joy that’s brought on by childhood images of cartoons, nor is it about the bright happy colors on del Rosario’s canvasses. Instead it is a happiness that’s premised on a sense of nostalgia; a joy that’s grounded in a seeming melancholia.