curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana

Transcription

1 curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana

2 the midnight marriage Copyright Silverlens Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the above mentioned copyright holders, with the exception of brief excerpts and quotations used in articles, critical essays or research. All texts copyright the authors. Cover Image: Study for a Painting I, Back Cover Image: Untitled (Butcher s Blossoms V) diptych,, detail Philippines 2F YMC Bldg Don Chino Roces Ave Ext Makati City 1231 T F M Mon-Fri 10am-7pm, Sat 1-6pm Singapore 47 Malan Road #01-25 Gillman Barracks Singapore T F M info@silverlensgalleries.com

3 curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana

4 Art as rendezvous--the force behind any unifying event, whether in the personal or cultural sphere, is a common agenda. Amid a multitude of players or in the innermost privacy between two conspirators, it always finds its way to come together, and is almost always acted upon through any means necessary: in undisclosed meetings, in secret pacts, in the mutual agreements signed and hidden away in the cellar of our minds. Within the creative act is the same force, however accidental. Even within the same painting it can be evident. Consider Rene Magritte s Midnight Marriage and the fusion of its different elements: a mirror, a severed head with its back turned, a wig on its stand, the balcony against the view of inverted trees, all coming together within the same frame. And in Magritte s own claim to denounce himself as a surrealist, the pieces in effect present themselves not as mere juxtapositions but inevitable combinations to restore an idea. Within the three worlds of three artists painting today, the same can be said on how they come together within a space. Within the three distinct worlds of PATRICIA PEREZ EUSTAQUIO, NONA GARCIA, and MARIA TANIGU- CHI, the gallery provides the single frame representing an inevitable union borne out of the substance of shared memories, histories, and kinship. Having been part of the same generation and having spent significant number of years working together, the affinity, though, that resonates from their works neither comes from a common trait nor a shared discipline, but from a mutual commitment to elevate their craft to a level where form can stand against the same high order of concept/memory which preceded it. This understanding surrounds the space in silence as it does not speak in the language of genres or movements.

5 And each of the artist s identity becomes muted, as their union progresses from one artwork to the next, combining history with type, memory with sensibility. It ensues as a clandestine affair no matter how their works take on a different medium, format, or entity. The coherence that can be detected, defined by having spent their formative years as artists in proximity, presents the possibility for the audience to see continuity among their works: three artists, with three histories, whose works are arranged together as if to narrate a common past. It can start off with PATRICIA PEREZ EUSTAQUIO s paintings rendered in irregularly-shaped canvasses from her Butcher s Blossoms series. The paintings, which appear incomplete, indeterminate, and fragmented, whose images are cut off across the several jagged edges of the canvass, leave us the impression that these are carved out from something once whole. Like pieces of puzzles or depictions of continents from a map, they seem to ascribe to a bigger realm, like history, when we take out the parts we can only remember and re-live it according to how we shape them in our minds. Against these free-flowing, formless entities of EUSTAQUIO are the more definite paintings of MARIA TANIGUCHI which rise unyielding from their exactness the steady pattern of lines and monochromatic blocks across the frame (in continuation of her previous series of untitled works, News, and US Letter Paintings), fosters the rationality of a brick wall in its solidity as a structure, appearing objective and plain as the surface it is hung unto, outlined and numbered as facts out of an almanac. It corresponds well to EUSTAQUIO s selective memory as TANIGUCHI s seem to portray the unheralded truths blanketed in our minds the way they are built up and stacked without afterthought, imageless, minimal, and abstract like the time and date when we were born, yet a towering structure that make up our identities, which continue to gather and rise. And as we progress from one shared memory to another, what stands in between is NONA GARCIA s more critical approach to memory and painting itself. Hers depict the painting of a blank canvass on the very wall it is attached. The process to achieve the image includes taking a photograph of the canvass in its exact location where the painting is to be hung, in which the painting depicts none other than the photograph of the blank canvass itself. It is a

6 conceptual paradigm for what is and what is not, branching out from the lineage of Magritte all the way to Joseph Kosuth in questioning the trustworthiness of objects regarding their depictions in art. By depicting a photograph of a blank canvass GARCIA questions the trustworthiness of memory with art instead, and asks could there be anything in here at all? With the merging of GARCIA s, EUSTAQUIO s, and TANIGUCHI s works, they come to serve as mirrors against each other reflecting the real ties that bind: memory, history, and identity. Within what is common and what is different, what stands out seems to be the categorization into three chapters of a shared memory, prompting us to recall Nietszche s own classification of history into three types: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. These artworks are histories combined and memories restored whether taken from a selection of dreams, facts, or the question of memory itself. And however which way their art and histories have moved into separate routes they have come back to arrange a meeting point, to approach the possibility of becoming one, to re-examine the properties of convergence. Cocoy Lumbao

7 manila 14 march - 27 april

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9 Installation view the midnight marriage 14 Mar - 27 Apr 2012 Silverlens Manila

10 Installation view the midnight marriage 14 Mar - 27 Apr 2012 Silverlens Manila

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12 NONA GARCIA Study for a Painting I oil on canvas 72 x 96 in x cm

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14 Study for a Painting III oil on canvas 48 x 60 in x cm

15 Study for a Painting II oil on canvas 84 x 60 in x cm

16 MARIA TANIGUCHI Untitled acrylic on canvas 84 x 120 in x cm

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18 US Letter Painting #6 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm US Letter Painting #7 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm

19 US Letter Painting #8 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm US Letter Painting #13 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm

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21 US Letter Painting #14 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm US Letter Painting #15 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm US Letter Painting #16 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm US Letter Painting #17 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm

22 US Letter Painting #18 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm

23 US Letter Painting #19 acrylic on linen 24 x 18 in x cm

24 PATRICIA PEREZ EUSTAQUIO Untitled (Butcher s Blossoms V) (diptych) oil on canvas 92 x 79 in x cm (each)

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27 Untitled (Dead Birds) I VII (set of 7) glazed stoneware variable dimensions

28 Untitled (Swatches I, II, III) oil on wood 9.5 X 9 in x cm 8.5 x 8 in x cm 8.3 x 8.5 in x cm

29 Untitled (Swatches) X oil on wood 9.45 x in 24 x 26 cm

30 Untitled (Swatches IV, V, VI) oil on wood 9 x 9 in x cm 9.5 x 9 in x cm 10.5 x 9.5 in x cm

31 Untitled (Swatches VII, VIII, IX) oil on wood 8 x 7 in x cm 9 x 9.5 in x cm 8.5 x 8 in x cm

32 Artists Bio Nona Garcia NONA GARCIA (b. 1978, Manila) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts major in Painting degree at the University of the Philippines. Recent solo shows include: Before The Sea, West Gallery, Quezon City, Manila, Philippines, False Apparitions, 2012, Valentine Willie Fine Art in Singapore, Somewhere Else, Finale Art File, Makati City, Manila, Philippines, 2012; Fractures, West Gallery, Manila, 2010; Synonyms, Finale Art File, Makati City, Manila, 2009; Planted Landscapes, Podium Mandaluyong City, Manila 2008 and Points of Departure, West Gallery, Mandaluyong City, Manila, She has also participated in numerous exhibitions in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Italy, Prague and Japan. Garcia has become one of the rising stars of the Filipino contemporary art scene, praised for the craftsmanship of her photorealistic paintings. Her works express empty apartments, abandoned homes, broken objects, crashed cars, crumpled papers, flooded places, boot homes, portraits without faces, decayed pavilions, saints with averted faces, wrapped surgical and industrial equipment, ready to be sanitized in the autoclave. Some of her images are done with microscopic probing, they are first x-rayed and photographed, their negatives displayed in lighted boxes. In 2003 she was a recipient of the 13 Artists Award and in 2000, Garcia was the grand prize winner of the Philip Morris Group of Companies ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Art Award in Singapore. The artist lives and works in Manila, Philippines.

33 maria taniguchi Maria Taniguchi was born and raised in Dumaguete City, Philippines. She studied sculpture at the University of the Philippines, and completed an MFA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths in London. She was part of a post-academic program for artists working with the moving image, the LUX Associate Artists Program, also in London. Patricia Perez Eustaquio Patricia Perez Eustaquio or Patty Eustaquio (b. August 1977; lives & works in Manila) studied World Cultures in Trieste, Italy and pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting (Magna cum Laude) at the University of the Philippines. Eustaquio works in a variety of media in both painting and sculpture, pushing both forms into the realm of craft and design. Her works explore the vanity of such constructs, citing histories and processes related to different materials by crafting highly decorative objects and then deliberately shaving off its parts to create the stark contrasts of what is present vs. the absent, arriving at the finished albeit nuanced form. Her paintings depict magnified details of still lifes, transforming them into ornately shaped, large canvasses. Her ghost forms constructed out of handmade lace are shrouds that take on the form of their former selves, so that a chair appears only as its shell and nothing more. Of this series, Eustaquio s Psychogenic Fugue, a sculpture in crocheted lace of a ghost pinao, was included in the exhibit, Popping Up, at the Hong Kong Art Centre in 2010 alongside artists Michael Lin, Toyo Ito and other established Asian artists. It was also included in Credit Sulsse s Chimera show at the Singapore Art Museum in 2012.

34 Patricia is a Thirteen Artists Award recipient. I t is an award given to Filipino artists below 40 years of age by the national arts commission, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, every three to four years. She is also the winner of the Ateneo Art Awards in 2009, and part of its shortlists for 2010 and Her work has been exhibited in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, New York, and Basel, and her work is part of the Singapore Art Museum collection and private collections in Southeast Asia as well as in the U.S. and Europe. She has also presented works in Open Studios in the Netherlands, where she was an artist-inresidence in Delft, in 2009, under the a.i.r. program of stichting id11 and in New York state, where she was a resident in Art Omi.

35 Silverlens in its three Manila exhibition spaces and new space in Gillman Barracks, Singapore, show contemporary art from the Philippines. The Philippines is the art backbone, together with Indonesia, of Southeast Asia. Silverlens unique vision for the region, through its exhibition program, artist representation, and institutional collaboration, aims to place Philippine Contemporary Art within the broader framework of international contemporary art dialogue. Established in 2004, Silverlens was the first photography gallery in Southeast Asia. Having established its photography core, it expanded to include exhibitions of the rest of the contemporary arts in Silverlens was founded by Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo, artists who work with photography, and has earned recognition from both artists and collectors as one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Southeast Asia. Recent collaborations include the Singapore Art Museum, New Museum in New York City, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, Busan Biennale, Aichi Triennale. Recent institutional collectors of Silverlens artists include LUMI Collection (Finland), Singapore Art Museum, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Collection (Manila), Since 2008, Silverlens has been participating in key international art fairs, such as ArtHK, Art Stage Singapore, Pulse New York, Pulse Miami, and Volta Basel.

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