Photo on canvas, image from Strikeanyspace Whatever Trading
Manila does not see new work from an international roster of artists everyday. Those eager to experience current work from name artists making waves in the global scene must head to Finale Art Gallery, where Yason Banal delivered the art experience of the week. The gallery has lined up an interesting trio of shows for their patrons this month—just the thing for this spate of holiday weekends.
Strikeanyspace Whatever Trading
I thought that the best thing about Strikeanyspace Whatever Trading, the show Yason curated, is the video collage he projected onto the gallery’s far wall. Four videos run simultaneously, their images overlapping on the massive walls, dominating the entire space. He wanted to show each film layered onto the other three, in effect creating one entirely new work.
The video by the ensemble Chicks On Speed speaks of the art market, Charles Saatchi, and the Venice Biennale. Flashing over it now and again is a proclamation by France’s Mathieu Laurette that he still lives, the words I Am Still Alive spelled out by a teleprompter in purple. We also witness Colombian Juan Pablo Echeverri’s intervention at a Gay Pride parade in Madrid. But the clip that resonated most with Pinoy artists was from Assume Vivid Astro Focus (avaf). Both the pseudonym of Brazilian Edi Sudbrack and the name of the collective he heads with French multimedia artist Christophe Hamaide-Pierson, avaf collaborated with Lady Gaga for the 2011 holiday shop and windows at Barney’s flagship store in New York. The animated piece they loaned for Yason’s exhibit keeps to the jubilant carnivalesque psychedelia that their followers adore.
Yason commissioned a dozen renowned curators, among them Adriano Pedrosa of the Istanbul Biennale, to “… create text on notions of resistance in the age of markets and networks.” The curators’ essays have been stenciled on Finale’s long wall, each one a different color, and positioned in exactly the same place and measuring exactly the same size as Nona Garcia’s paintings from the show immediately preceding this one. Austria’s Galerie Zimmermann Krachtowill financed the cost of mounting the essays as art pieces.
Yason explains, “I liked the idea of the previous paintings substituted by critical text, yet still sponsored by a commercial gallery: the notions of criticality being framed by the market. None of the artists’ works have titles or dimensions. It’s the curators’ texts that have been given titles and dimensions!”
Also on view: Filipino enfant terrible Robert Langenegger’s “vandalization” of a Lee Aguinaldo collage via his painting of a giant raincloud drenching the framed Aguinaldo with spray-painted orange rain. Plus ready for perusal, two piles of photos on canvas from several Indonesian artists mounted right by the videos.
Banners from Herman Chong and Jordan Wolfson hang back to back from the gallery’s ceiling. A Singaporean artist, Chong represented his country in the 2005 Venice Biennale, while the American artist Wolfson won the 2009 Cartier Award for that year’s Frieze Art Fair. In her review of Wolfson’s January 2012 video, Animations Mask, New York Times critc Roberta Smith declared it “had the makings of a classic.” Perhaps Yason can bring that one for us next time?
Animated video still from Assume Vivid Astro Focus (avaf) supermimposed on a still from Mathieu Laurette "I Am Still Alive"
Video stills from Chicks on Speed and Juan Pablo Echeverri
Video still from Mathieu Laurette, "I Am Still Alive"
Curators texts as art
Robert Langenegger raining on a Lee Aguinaldo
Lee Aguinaldo collage, detail
Yasmin Sison perusing piled photos on canvas
Jordan Wolfson banner
List of artists
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Soler, Static Nature
The beauty of the natural world comes from its inconsistency and imperfections, the bumps and crags that no man can create. The grid, on the other hand, is its antithesis, used to assume order by laying out precise lines and definite spaces. In his show, Static Nature, Soler Santos attempts to meld the two.
The images Soler has painted on canvas comes from a cache of his own photographs of trees, tree trunks, branches, and twigs. By employing the rigidity of the grid on both the renditions and installation of his paintings, he has transformed natural objects into specimens, converting its variability into stability, containing them, thus rendering nature static.
Soler's grid of paintings contained in boxed frames
Detail
Detail
Oil painting by Soler
Assemblages from found twigs and polaroid shots
Trio of Soler's oil paintings
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Exhibit installation view
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Ambrosia Temporale San Juan Industria, Liv Vinluan
Those of us who only know Liv Vinluan through her paintings will be pleasantly surprised. This seemingly jaunty animated short film however, contains dark undertones. It follows the adventures of a snake that slithers from paradise into a land of shadows. There, it chases its own tail and ends up consuming itself.
Liv Vinluan, "Ambrosia Temporale San Juan Industria", video still
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Liv Vinluan sculpture
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Strikeanyspace Whatever Trading, Static Nature, and Ambrosia Temporale San Juan Industria run from 11 to 27 August 2012 at Finale Art File, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Pasong Tamo (Chino Roces Avenue), Makati City. Phone (632) 813-2310 or visit www.finaleartfile.com or https://www.facebook.com/finale.artfile