Lyra Garcellano with Jeff Carnay for Taxonomy
Three generations of contemporary artists make up the Silverlens Galleries’ offerings for the month: a celebrated Filipino artist in his 50s who now lives in France, a painter in her late 30s from the seminal group Surrounded By Water returning to performance art, and a young artist barely two years out of university experimenting with abstraction. Continue reading
Lyra Garcellano, "Aria"
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.
Lyra Garcellano, "Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre"
Lyra Garcellano needed to bring herself out of a rut. We can all relate to that. Sometimes it just feels better to slosh around
Lyra Garcellano, "Nessum Dorma" and "Last Tango"
in self-pity. It takes too much effort to rise above a bad patch. You can’t imagine yourself out of the shadows.
Lyra Garcellano, "Parabola"
Through her paintings, Lyra attempts to mirror these emotions. She depicts her subjects as they lie immersed in the blues, floundering, helpless. She paints in sepia, tones she has been using for most of her recent pieces. Lyra fills her pieces with dainty details, soft folds on clothing here, windblown grass there. She treads delicately on despair.
In the throes of despair
She also exhibits two large- scale charcoal drawings of subjects on a free fall. These hang from way up on the gallery’s far wall. At
Lyra Garcellano, "How Deep Is The Ocean, How High Is The Sky I and II"
the center of the space, she mounts an installation of a ladder that casts a looming shadow in white cement. The first few of the ladder’s rungs stand broken, illustrating the difficult climb ahead.
Lyra Garcellano
Eventually, like Lyra, you expect her subjects to get a grip, get a move on, get going with life. But for the meantime, what a wondrous way to wallow!
Old Pain by Lyra Garcellano runs from 9 to 30 September 2009 at Finale Art File, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, Pasong Tamo, Makati. Phone (632) 810-4071 or visit http://www.finaleartfile.com
The year starts off with great news for us art lovers—- our favorite Filipino artists have been invited to a show that travels to Milan and Beijing. Southeast is B(l)ooming opens on Febuary 11, with a special client preview sometime January, at the Marella Gallery in Milan. The show brings together the current crop of contemporary art darlings that dominate both the auction and gallery circuits of Southeast Asia. Continue reading