Category Archives: arts and culture


Do You Believe In Rodel Tapaya?

Rodel Tapaya, "Kagat Daliri", detail

Rodel Tapaya mounts an exhibit of paintings in a style he knows best, what art writer Professor  Alice Guillermo labels in her essay, The Hauntings of Rodel Tapaya, as cultural surrealism.  He continues to mine our Filipino folk traditions for narratives that he can translate onto his canvases.  This time, he casts his eye on superstitious beliefs, adages passed down from those wives of yore, practices that still come alive in parts of the country untouched by urban jadedness. Continue reading →


Mark Justiniani Goes 3D

Mark Justiniani, "Impasse"

As he prepared for this exhibit, Mark Justiniani would wake up excited every morning. “A little nervous too”, he added, “as if I were a young artist just doing his first show!” Five notebooks and his iPad had been filled with scribbles in black ink. The sketches served as studies and ruminations, his preparations for the series of works now making their debut at Finale Art Gallery. Continue reading →


Patty Eustaquio Travels To Cloud Country, Tatong Recheta Torres Gets Fuzzy, while Isa Lorenzo Shows Wonderful Photograms

Tatong Recheta Torres, "Fandom Vulgaris", detail

Three confident artists make for three fearless exhibits.  These three don’t shy away from taking their art to new directions.  Whether or not their explorations work, the attempts in themselves make their shows worth visiting. Continue reading →


Pam Yan Santos, They Are Birds If They Fly

As the wife of Jose John Santos III, art collectors consider her as half of one of Philippine art’s super couples.  But at home in Pasig, where she works alongside her husband out of their third floor studio, Pamela Yan Santos, 37, comes across as, first and foremost, mother to her eight-year-old son, Juno.  Her art, multi-layered acrylic paintings and serigraphs on canvas, have frequently reflected her experiences as a parent of a child with special needs. “I don’t think I can get out of that, it’s part of my system”, she says with a wry smile. Continue reading →


September Roundup: Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Roberto Chabet, Mark Andy Garcia, Jigger Cruz, Dex Fernandez, Bjorn Calleja, Cos Zicarelli, Kawayan de Guia

Jigger Cruz, "Dead End", detail

Between awaiting this upgraded site and attending to a ton of work, September just whizzed by me.  Manila’s art scene yielded some incredible shows.  While I did get the chance to catch most of them, I couldn’t find the time to sit down and write.  For posterity’s sake, I thought I’d document them here anyway.  Here are September 2011’s highlights: Continue reading →


Art Break: Morsels in Marseilles, Loads in London

Street art at the Cours Julien enclave, Marseilles

Viewing modern and contemporary art would not top a tourist’s to-do list for a trip to the south of France.  The breathtaking natural beauty of Marseilles’ jagged coastline, and the earthy charm of its city streets provide enough sustenance for one’s senses. However, Marseilles has been named the European City of Culture for 2013, so I thought I’d attempt to scope out its visual arts scene as I explored its sights. Continue reading →


Lyra Garcellano’s Epistolary

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.

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Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Hong Kong Intervention, Alfredo + Isabel Aquilizan’s Address, and Sandra Palomar and Nolet Soliven’s Flesh at UP Vargas

Artists Sandra Palomar and Sun Yuan

I’m a big fan of Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.  Ever since I saw Angel, a hyper realistic sculpture of a dead angel splayed on the ground, I have sought to keep abreast of their work.  Made from silica gel and fiberglass, the most striking feature possessed by the wrinkled seraphim is a pair of molted wings.  His feathers have withered away, and instead, he is left with wings of flesh and bone; they resemble chicken wings after they’ve been dressed. I saw it when it came up for auction last year.

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ManilArt 11: Art In The Dark

Tatong Recheta Torres, "Untitled (Diptych)", at Art Informal

The invitation said be there at six, and I thought I’d be fashionably late.  I arrived close to seven pm, wondering if I could get away with not strictly following the Filipiniana dress code.  I need not have stressed.  I got there to find the venue in darkness, tons of people jostling about in the sidelines, trying to get past usherettes standing guard, preventing guests from crossing the red cordon that ringed the venue.  Apparently, the ribbon had yet to be cut.  Music blared from a stage at the far end where song and dance numbers were going on.  Was this an art fair?  The crowds could but peer at the pieces on display as tempers flared.  Incredibly, this state of affairs continued for an hour and a half, until the last politician had given what sounded like filibuster from a privilege speech.  Only then did the lights come on.  A surreal, truly chaotic, Only in da Pilipins, tableau unfolded on the vernissage of our city’s sole art fair.

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Pow Martinez Destroys Planets

Pow Martinez liberally throws around the word astig.  He uses it nonchalantly, with a casual shrug.

George Condo, the American artist who paints caricature-like figures with pursed lips, bulging eyes, and scrunched up heads?  He’s astig.  Philip Guston and his cartoonish renderings?  Yup, him too.  Ditto the Scottish animator David Shrigley, and provocateur Dash Snow, he of the hedonistic lifestyle who died of an overdose two years ago.  On the local front, the word is reserved for the likes of Manuel Ocampo and Jayson Oliveria, purveyors of chaotic and sexually explicit images. Continue reading →