It's Casual Entertainment, We Aim to Please!
Galleria Duemila's 47th Anniversary | Manila
"It's Casual Entertainment, We Aim to Please!"
3 December to 14 January 2023
Galleria Duemila celebrates its 47th anniversary.
To commemorate this milestone, the gallery is re-opening the whole gallery space and presenting its Christmas show entitled “It’s Casual Entertainment, We Aim to Please!” by well-acclaimed artists in the local art scene; Ronald Achacoso, Jon Cuyson, Ramon Manuel de Leon, Raul Rodriguez, Jonathan Olazo,Trek Valdizno and Cris Villanueva Jr. – a double entendre year-end party.
Our appetite to consume art is mostly driven by our need to seek for sensory pleasure that often leaves us in a surplus of popular aesthetics; the representational imagery, the familiar and digestible, and the marketable and ornamental art works. In “It’s Casual Entertainment, We Aim to Please!,” the audience are invited to take part in a gathering of artists whose practices have endured decades of changes in the art scene. The exhibition can be seen as a potluck of artistic works, where each artist brings their own unique conceptual ideas – an intimate look into their journey and their artistic evolution.
This exhibition showcases artists whose oeuvre exemplifies mastery of technique, while managing to execute with utmost freedom and control, of equal measure. Jonathan Olazo gives us a taste of what has come out of his prolific experimentations in painting. In “Elevators and Labyrinths,” we see his use of vat dye process in creating his large ground that appears as a creased and wrinkled canvas where he superimposes child-like abstracted linear markings. In it, we see hints of door-like images in varying scales and upon prolonged viewing the overlapping lines would suggest a topographic view of a maze. His work “The Bacon Arena” likewise gives the audience a suggestive imagery of a Francis Bacon painting from the sketch-like linear imagery, in which the use of geometric lines heavily influences the space where the central figure is often placed. These works encourage the viewer to make their own connection as the automaticity of the process leaves a roomful of interpretations, subject to the playfulness of the viewer’s own imagination.
Cris Villanueva Jr.’s “Someday our Gods can be Friends” and “Lazy Greedy, Frightened People Looking for Easier and Safer Ways to do Things” are products of elaborate planning and execution that hides in the guise of spontaneity and haphazard abstracted imagery. Villanueva Jr.’s meticulous transfer of small or digital studies into his canvases highlights his command over his chosen medium. His realistic simulation of a blackboard with chalk markings and erasures along with his tactile ink blot imagery evokes simplicity but in reality, it taunts the perceiver to induce what is left unsaid or hidden behind the palimpsests of paint.
Jon Cuyson’s “UNTITLED SOS” (Storm Season in Four Parts) ruminates over the uncertainty of our times and calls for the need of introspection. At the foreground of each work are two horizontal lines reminiscent of calming landscapes and of being parallel to the earth and serving as their backgrounds is a dividing line between a flat colored surface and another with evident random brush strokes. The backgrounds are suggestive of the polarity between the past and the present times in which we live in, while the build-up layers of acrylic paint of the horizontal bar lines denote the persistent will to reflect and stay steady on both moments.
Personal interests and interpersonal relationships frequently manifest in an artist’s work which renders a semi-autobiographical piece. This may be seen in Ronald Achacoso and Trek Valdizno’s works whose art has evolved through their experiences and passion outside the art world. Achacoso has been immersed in environmental and ecological endeavors and has used it to further his artistic pursuits. His work “Berthic Zone” emulates ecological life forms residing under the sea – vibrant and full of life. In it, we find anamorphic forms in bright colors that seem to move towards a coral like figure. In “Messenger” the images resemble the etches on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) used in computers and other technology while at the same time an may seem like an outline of overlapping biological forms. In both cases, it suggests interconnectedness across all life forms.
Valdizno on the other hand allows his inner psyche and his sublime consciousness permeate in his works. Using non-traditional brushes and materials, his colorful and animated compositions are depictions of his spiritual representation of the material world.
He comments that “Each brushstroke comes from my direct response to an inner directive and not from aesthetic standards.” Evident in works such as “Confine Yourself to the Present” and “The Memory of Everything is Very Soon Overwhelmed in Time” his gestures exhume the moments he is in and the internalization that activates in his mind and manifests through his hands.
Ramon Manuel De Leon and Raul Rodriguez use societal issues, found images and personal musings to fuel their prolific artistic experimentations on materials and mixed media. In De Leon’s “Untitled” series, Urs Fischer’s works became his source of inspiration, an attempt to push himself to understand the latter’s process of handling paint until the resulting images screamed his own artistic voice. The collage figurative images of tropical landscapes, pacific islanders and superimposed earthly colors overlaying the compositions resonates the local flavor he has infused with the series.
Rodriguez combines contemporary events and art history to bridge the gap between the harshness of reality and the solace that art provides to its viewers. In his work “Bright Lights, Black Out,” he illustrates the duality we faced at the onset of the Covid Pandemic. The torn image of a forearm lying on a red cloth depicts our unwilling submission to the crisis while the balanced oval object takes a queue from Brancusi’s head sculpture – an object analogous to simplicity and tranquility. “What is More Disturbing” juxtaposes Goya’s Black Painting and the images of Duterte’s “Tokhang” operations. His interpretation of both subjects resulted in a more palatable abstracted vantage point that leaves the audience to their own conclusions and interpretations.
The invitation to this exhibition is meant for casual entertainment but the collective effort of the artists is a showcase of the potency of contemporary art to evolve into meaningful and productive conversions and introspections.
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