#FILMFRIDAY: SOS by Jon Cuyson
#FILMFRIDAY
In the current context of chaos and anxiety, his works investigate and claim horizontality as a form of resistance to verticality. The artist builds layers of acrylic paint and marks on the canvas, repeating and revising in order to build densities in the surface resulting in an interplay of receding and advancing geometric abstract compositions. Consistent with his interest in the narrative of the sea, Jon Cuyson borrows the maritime code distress signal, SOS (Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls), as exhibition title, and to serve as a conceptual anchor in the paintings that reveal a restrained form of poetic urgency.
-Galleria Duemila, from Jon Cuyson’s exhibition, “SOS'“, 2022
Jon Cuyson is an artist and filmmaker from the Philippines. He received his MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2010 and has participated in both local and international exhibitions. His works employ different techniques and media including texts, photographs, drawings, paintings, artist books, sculpture, video, and installation. His artistic practice investigates the complex intersections of history, visual culture, movement, and identity.
In 2022, he presented a new body of work that featured paintings, collages on paper, and a video that explores horizontality and abstraction. In the current context of chaos and anxiety, his works investigate and claim horizontality as a form of resistance to verticality. The artist builds layers of acrylic paint and marks on the canvas, repeating and revising in order to build densities in the surface resulting in an interplay of receding and advancing geometric abstract compositions. Similarly, the video included in the exhibition features horizontal bars with overlapping images of both dripping paint and hidden images of the sea. Consistent with his interest in the narrative of the sea, Jon Cuyson borrows the maritime code distress signal, SOS (Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls), as the exhibition title, and to serve as a conceptual anchor in the paintings that reveal a restrained form of poetic urgency. His SOS paintings will be included in the group exhibition An Elusive Edge: Articulations of Philippine Abstraction, curated by Patrick D. Flores, and will be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in Manila in 2023.
His previous works have been shown in a number of local and international exhibitions, including Motions Of This Kind, Brunei Gallery, UCL, London, England (2019), South by Southeast, Times Museum, Guangzhou (2016); Radiation, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok (2014); Me Love You Long Time, Aljira, Newark, New Jersey (2012); Lost In Your Eyes/Foreign Correspondant, FormContent Gallery, London (2009); Musee Du Louvre, The Royal Academy of Art, London (2008); AIM 27 Here and Elsewhere, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx City, New York (2007).
Jon Cuyson currently lives and works in Manila where he continues to teach while working on his diverse artistic practice.
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