Tag Archives: Finale Art File
Kiri Dalena’s Washed Out
Trust Kiri Dalena to bring recent history home to us without resorting to horrific images of tragedy and destruction, but by making us feel the power of the river at the heart of a natural calamity. Continue reading
Lyra Garcellano’s Epistolary
After disappearing for a year, spending six months of 2010 in an Asian Cultural Council grant in New York, Lyra Garcellano has come back with wonderful new work. In Epistolary, her solo exhibit at Finale Art File, Lyra has treated us to five paintings she describes as imprints. Faint figures whisper from her canvases, barely discernible through her loose pastel strokes. All of women, their floral frocks blur into the background, creating sheer, almost abstract, patterns. Her paintings have always stood out for their delicacy and softness, and evoke a sense of romantic melancholia. This set keeps to that sensibility, progressing naturally from her previous pieces. To me, they seem to project a more confident Lyra.
Roberto Chabet: 50 Years Comes To Manila- Ziggurat at West Gallery, onethingafteranother at Finale
After exhibits in Singapore and Hong Kong in January and February, the Manila leg of Roberto Chabet: 50 Years opened with two shows running almost simultaneously. Ziggurat at West Gallery and onethingafteranother at Finale are the most recent events in this yearlong project. The series of exhibits celebrates Roberto Chabet’s half a century of influence in the Philippine art scene. Continue reading
Geraldine Javier’s Wild Things
Nothing ever appears haphazard in a Geraldine Javier exhibit. Every element is carefully considered for cohesiveness, nary a detail out of place. Always Wild, Still Wild, now on view at Finale Art File, demonstrates this yet again. Continue reading
Robert Langenegger Means No Offense
We welcome 2011 with the crass, the crude, the inimitable Robert Langenegger. Love him or hate him, whether his pieces make you laugh out loud or cringe in disgust, you have to admit that Robert’s work is certainly distinct. He has claimed the cartoon-like renditions of the most coarse and vulgar–injected with a twisted sense of humor–as his very own. This purveyor of the perverse has brought his narratives to Paris, for an exhibit at Talmart Galerie in 2009, and will be headed to Austria, for a residency with the Galerie Zimmermann Krachtochwill this September. Continue reading
Nilo Ilarde Thinks About Paintings
So what exactly is a painting? That seems to be the question that Nilo Ilarde asks us to consider as we make our way around the colossal pieces of Painting As Something And The Opposite of Something, his solo exhibit currently on view at Finale Art File.
On a visual level, the show is spectacular. We get that wow factor without feeling overwhelmed by the number and the size of his work. While we see treatment that recall past pieces (words scraped on the wall, empty tubes of paint), we come upon surprising additions.
We all know that Nilo puts his curatorial stamp on a good number of shows in Manila. So he knew exactly how to work with Finale’s expansive Tall Gallery. But we also know that Nilo challenges on another, more cerebral, level. And his exhibits engage all the more because of that.
For starters, we have been asked to suspend our conventional notion of paintings, and accept the five pieces he has on view as his paintings, unorthodox as that may sound.
The first of those five immediately catches our eye. Scratched out in gigantic letters that fill most of the gallery’s long wall, Nilo appropriates Martin Kippenberger’s cheeky request: Dear Painter, Paint For Me. The line comes from the title of Kippenberger’s seminal suite of works from 1981 that also turned painting on its ear. Kippenberger had a sign painter execute his portraits in various stage-managed tableaux. In Nilo’s piece, the statement on the wall is itself the finished product. You have a painting, albeit one that had undergone the reverse process from the norm. Paint has carefully been stripped off wood, rather than brushed on it.
Across from this, we see a glass receptacle that houses hundreds of used paint tubes. We saw about half this amount in 2009, as I Have Nothing to Paint, and I’m Painting It. Now with double the number collected from various artists, Nilo has transformed the piece into The Void Speaks In Each Painting, Between The Brushstrokes. Here we see the response to Kippenberger’s plea: Nilo’s colleagues, dear painters all, have indeed painted for him. Composer John Cage once said that the gap between the notes can also be considered as music. Discarded paint tubes make up a painting’s gap. Thus, these repositories of paint, from which several paintings had been created, collectively make up a painting too.
Beside the amassed tubes hangs a boxing ring’s old floor,
resurrected, with much cajoling, from the Elorde Sports Center storage. This massive square of printed canvas acts as Nilo’s third painting. He installs this as a diamond, a nod to Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie. Filled with drips of sweat accumulated from the numerous boxers who have sparred on it, their DNA served as the paint that completed the piece.
How can we miss The Road To Flatness? A crushed blue car suspended high above the gallery’s far wall and installed just as a large-scale painting will definitely receive its share of attention. A hired pay loader went to work on an old Volkswagen Beetle until the car had been completely squashed. The pay loader mimicked an Abstract Expressionist, levelling the car’s figure, obliterating all but it’s basic form.
In Making Nothing Out Of Something, Nilo goes further than merely scraping off paint from the gallery’s walls. With the intent to start afresh–he uses the term Tabula Rasa– he completely removed all traces of what had been in that portion of the wall, layer by layer, until only empty space remains. But the irony is, because the emptiness gives us a peek into what we did not see before (Finale’s backroom), he hasn’t really created nothing. We get a framed look at more paintings—Nilo’s final painting of stacked paintings.
“The paintings are about paintings thinking about paintings”, is how Nilo explains his work. We could probably say the same thing about his impact on us. Once we’ve gone beyond the visual feast, the show gets us thinking about paintings too. Well, it did me.
Painting As Something And As The Opposite Of Something runs from 9 July to 2 August at the Finale Art File, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Pasong Tamo, Makati City. Phone (632)813-2310 or visit http://www.finaleartfile.com
Jonathan Ching Finds Botero's Leg
I wanted to see this show because its title intrigued me. Why does Jonathan Ching need to search for Botero’s leg? It turns out that he intends for the exhibit to play on memories, random thoughts and experiences that cross his mind, including recollections
of his own past work. A favorite computer game, Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego, inspired the exhibit’s title, along with the show’s biggest piece.
In the first three panels of Living With Botero’s Leg, a multi-media quadriptych, Jon depicts distinctive footwear: two styles of cowboy boots and a pair of silk Chinese slippers for bound feet. None of them would suit the hefty proportions of a Fernando Botero subject, an approximation of which he places on the piece’s fourth panel. Here we find the elusive leg, portly as expected, cast in metal, and crowned with tin embellishments used for altarpieces. With this piece, Jon continues his series of incorporating objects within his paintings, a device he used extensively for his show at Blanc Compound in April.
Smaller canvases make up the rest of the show, most of them oval-shaped. Jon felt
that his personal reminiscences called for these intimate sizes. On two of these, Topiary Of My Mind and Chimes, he integrates sculpted blackbirds fabricated from polymer clay.
The pieces I find most interesting are the three free-standing sculpture of black swans that hearken to origami, the Japanese art of creating figures from folded paper. Constructed from GI sheets and finished with automotive paint, the swans reference his past work, an installation of numerous folded birds from his 2003 two-man show with Christina Dy at the now-defunct Surrounded By Water. I don’t exactly know how these three pieces fit in with his paintings, and perhaps they don’t. However, I think it would be great to see him take his origami sculpture further, explore different patterns, even experiment with textures. Maybe next time, at some future show, Jon can allow his sculpture to take center stage. But of course, I am usually more partial to sculpture. So perhaps my biases are showing.
Where In The World Is Botero’s Leg runs from 9 July to 2 August 2010 at Finale Art File, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Pasong Tamo, Makati. Phone (632) 813-2310 or visit http://www.finaleartfile.com or visit http://www.jonching.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS1RsnyzlP4
Nona Garcia Works With Synonyms While MM Yu Gets Wasted
The Paulino Que Collection of Philippine Modern Art
A year ago, Paulino and Hetty Que allowed Manila art lovers to revel in their wonderful collection of Philippine contemporary
paintings. We all had our fill of the key Filipino artists making waves today in both the local and international art scene. Continue reading