Tag Archives: Slab


Smiley Happy People and Maria Jeona

Maria Jeona, detail, "Monogamist Kultur at Si Sexy at Maraming Stretchmarks at Malalaking Butas ng Ilong Long Long"

Early last week, I spent 14 hours straight in serious contemplation of art, and the better part of the next few days writing about it.  Even I needed a break from the art overload.  Enter Maria Jeona and her first solo show, mounted at SLab’s 20Square, the perfect antidote to all that cerebral activity.  She gave me just what I needed to get back into the swing of Manila’s art scene after a (very brief!) hiatus. Continue reading →


Alfredo Esquillo Jr. Throws Bato Bato Sa Langit

Alfredo Esquillo Jr., and "B.I. Joe"

In the series of paintings which he calls Tragicomedy, Alfredo Esquillo Jr. displays his more surrealist bent.  For these works, he makes repeated use of an image he christens as the wheelchair-jeepney.  A product of his imagination, he paints this as a jeepney’s dashboard without an engine.  Instead, the large wheels of the wheelchair appear to mechanically power the hybrid vehicle.  Through the years, Esqui has employed this in several of his pieces: on its own in Third World, pushed around in circles by several buffoons in Survivor, carrying a load of cartons in Lipat-Bahay.  He uses the wheelchair-jeepney as a device to underscore the hobbled and disabled state we Pinoys find ourselves unable to shake off, the legacy of repeated missteps by our political leadership.  Another conveyance that we see repeatedly in his tragicomedies is the double-faced jeepney, two jeepney dashboards facing opposite directions.  Esqui has used this as a metaphor for the Philippines’ lack of progress.  The state has two drivers pulling it in opposite directions. Continue reading →


Patty Eustaquio’s Dear Sweet Filthy World; Nona Garcia, Bruihn, and Anna Varona Make Rare Appearances

To what do we owe the surfeit of exciting shows that opened all over the metro this week?  It seems the ides of March has swept in

Patricia Eustaquio, "Dear Sweet Filthy World IV"

the muses, with the Silverlens group leading the way:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading →


Mark Justiniani Goes Out To Play

Mark Justiniani likes to play. Not many people know that Mark uses clay to prepare for his paintings.  He molds his figures, shapes them with his hands, and creates miniature tableaux of his narratives.  He studies the resulting three-dimensional scenes for nuances of light and shadow that he translates into his painted images.

Detail, "Aiming for Windmills"

Mark Justiniani enjoys paradoxes.  His pieces, especially his paintings on canvas and on wood, frequently employ graphic puns that fool around with the titles of his pieces or the absurdity of his images.  He also enjoys working with mirrors, using them as devices to aid his visual tricks.  For his 2005 piece, Bipolar, he attached a scratchboard that spelled out God against a mirror of roughly the same size.  Seen through the mirror, his stylized letters transform into the word Bad.  Mark loves to dwell on these juxtapositions, this coming together of opposite sides.

Mark Justiniani identifies with the Pinoy.  His love for Philippine language, history, and culture pervades throughout his work.  He peppers his visuals with uniquely Pinoy touches:  Jose Rizal holding on to a flagpole for dear life, the Illustrado who wears a hat too big for his head, OFWs sailing away on a fragile paper boat.  Underlying this is a close affinity to Pinoy humor. Even as he tackles the social realities of the day, Mark’s pieces retain the sense of self-deprecating whimsy that is so Filipino.

Detail, "Aiming For Windmills"

Mark Justiniani brings all these together, crystallizing all the elements that he uses as an artist, into a show of supersized proportions. Working with curator Patrick Flores, Mark propels to a new direction with Malikmata, a major solo exhibit opening this month at SLab.

Mark Justiniani "A Jar of Fireflies"

To move his art forward, Mark journeys back to his boyhood.  He takes accoutrements from a bucolic childhood spent in the sugar fields of Bacolod, and morphs them into gigantic, interactive objects and installations in resin, glass, mirrors, and steel.  Lola Basyang meets Anish Kapoor.

Malikmata means blink of an eye, and indeed, walking around his pieces will make viewers do a double take.  Aiming For Windmills is a six-foot- high slingshot fabricated in steel, the two points of its yoke connected by a rubber band 20 feet long.  It tilts to one side, ready to take aim with its bullet, a silicone head two feet in diameter.  A resin palm-sized firely hovers in its vicinity.

As a young boy Mark ran around catching spiders.  He sat listening to tales of aswang and duwende.  He snuck out at dusk chasing fireflies. His pieces allow you to glory in these reminiscences.

Detail of Agtabayon's chain mail with carabao horn inserts

Marvel at Collision, the four-foot -long matchbox of resin and steel, painted to resemble the box of Sunset matches from the 1970s, slid open to reveal enormous crossed matchsticks and Agtabayon, a pre-colonial Filipino diety in full battle armor. He fiercely protects the Philippines against a menacing spider decked in the battle gear of a Spanish conquistador.  Waiting in the wings, ready to spin its deadly web is another spider who symbolizes the American invader.   With its multiple components, I find this to be the most interesting piece of the show.

Mark Justiniani, "Collision"

Feel the sides of  the man-sized Jar of Fireflies,  made to simulate glass, translucent from the glow of fist-sized fireflies electronically blinking from within.  Peer through peepholes that bore through three sides of Council,  a nuno sa punso’s chest-high mound of fiberglass and steel shavings. Each set of peepholes show the goblins in varying states of battle.  Avoid the stare of the fiberglass tikbalang mounted high on a resin shirt of a child it has preyed on.

The pre-colonial diety, Agtabayon, standing up against the Spanish conquistador spider

As Patrick Flores describes it, Mark “…lapses into childhood in this exhibition, a wonderful place to be …he is able to take a pause from painting to recover the sense of play and image before “art.” It is a transition period in his practice, and uncannily he surrounds himself with artifacts of perception or the “techniques of the observer” that afford him a double vision, so to speak: a look back at the past and a glimpse into a possible future.”

Detail of spider as spanish conquistador

Mark Justiniani spent months doodling, filling six sketchbooks with ideas for this show.   He forged and reforged maquettes in clay.  He built wooden prototypes and consulted with experts.  All his energies culminate in this fantastic display that Manila’s art scene has not witnessed before.

Mark Justiniani, "Ligaw'

One piece in this exhibit stands out for its normal proportions. Inscribed on a strip of metal, which he pleated just as an accordion, are the words Tayo Na Kinupkop Sa Sinag ng Dilim.  Stand to the right and the words blend together to read Takipsilim.  Dusk.  That special time when day melds into the night, and it is neither light nor dark.  A paradox that Mark Justiniani revels in, that point of evolution that echoes just where he himself currently stands.

Detail of spider as an American GI

One view of "Takipsilim"

Another view, "Takipsilim"

Malikmata runs from 19 February to 13 March 2010 at SLab, 2F YMC Bldg. 2, 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati City.  Phone (632)816-0044 or visit http://www.slab.silverlensphoto.com

Mark Justinian, "Ligaw" at upper left, and "Council"

Note:  This post is reprinted from an article I wrote for the February 2010 issue of Rogue Magazine.  See http://www.rogue.ph

Julie Lluch, Mark Justiniani, Gilda Cordero Fernando, Dawn Atienza, and Joy Mallari

Haraya Ching takes a peep into Council


A peep through "Council"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsQ_W0mgrKk


Gaston Damag's Synthetic Reliquaries

Gaston Damag grew up around bululs.  Raised in  a family of craftsmen, he even admits to having parlayed his woodcarving skills into creating reproductions for tourists in search of these antique rice gods.  Today, even as he constantly exhibits in France and in other European locales, his Ifugao roots resonate very vividly in his art installations and performance pieces.  His artistic psyche is inextricably linked to the world of the Cordilleras.       

In this show at SLab, Gaston reworks pieces originally done for a Parisian museum.   Instead of using wood, he casts his bululs in resin polyester to irreverent proportions.  He brings these symbols of tradition and ancestry to the modern age, juxtaposing them against steel scaffoldings, fluorescent bulbs, and electrical drills.  He forces us to examine, as he probably does himself, how this change in context and medium affects how we look at a figure so associated with rice rituals and ancient beliefs.  Does it retain its mystique?

This is Gaston’s first major show in the Philippines, and for that reason alone, this show is worth visiting.  It brings something different to our art scene, and I can imagine, incurs varied reactions from viewers.  Alongside this, the Silverlens group brings us two other exceptional exhibits:  Stereo I, collaborative works by Christina Dy and Juan Cagicula and Paper Panic, works on paper from Dina Gadia and Mark Salvatus.

Thank you to Rachel Rillo for these photos.  My amateur attempts would not have done justice to Gaston’s pieces.

Synthetic Reliquaries runs from 13 January to 13 February 2010 at SLab, 2F YMC Bldg, 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati City.  Phone (632) 816-0044 or visit http://www.slab.silverlensphoto.com


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9kv2CF1jXM


Gilda’s Wondrous Whimsical Watercolors

gilda biyaheng pinoy

Gilda Cordero Fernando, "Biyaheng Pinoy"

(This piece comes out in the November issue of Town And Country Magazine.  In the course of writing this, I spent an exhilarating afternoon with GCF.  As an added bonus to the great conversation, she allowed me to wander through her art collection.  I am sharing pictures of her pieces in this post.) Continue reading →


Mariano Ching’s Minimalist Apocalypse

Mariano Ching, "Slight Ripples on a Dim Horizon"

Mariano Ching, "Slight Ripples On The Dim Horizon"

Mariano Ching, "Slight Ripples On The Dim Horizon"(Detail)

Mariano Ching, "Slight Ripples On The Dim Horizon"(Detail)

For works influenced by comic books and cartoons, Mariano Ching’s images feel surprisingly quiet.  You first notice his empty spaces, both on his acrylics

Mariano Ching, "Wonder Boy"

Mariano Ching, "Wonder Boy"

on large canvases and on his smaller paper pieces.  You would expect, just as in Japanese anime novels,  surfaces brimming over with forms and figures rendered in loud, bold colors.  Sort of like Takashi Murakami or even Louie Cordero.  Instead you get works that beckon, compelling you to look closely at the

Mariano Ching, "Wonder Boy" (Detail)

Mariano Ching, "Wonder Boy" (Detail)

compact images all scrunched together.  Only then do you appreciate Nano’s  details, so finely and minutely wrought.  You wonder, as I did aloud to him, whether he paints while looking through a microscope or a magnifying glass.

Mariano Ching, "Mounds and Moles 5"

Mariano Ching, "Mounds and Moles 5"

His recent paintings, including those in this show, use a lot of rainbows, arcs of red, purple, green, blue, and yellow.  Because of this, and of the bright colors he employs, you don’t immediately perceive how melancholic or freaky his figures are:  girls with large distended heads, severed body parts, distorted faces, a pile of garbage and muck.  That the show brings

Mariano Ching, "Mounds and Moles 8"

Mariano Ching, "Mounds and Moles 8"

us to an imaginary wasteland, a site that reels from an environmental disaster, becomes apparent only after awhile.  His minimalist sensibilities, acquired from his two years as a printmaking major at the Kyoto Arts

Mariano Ching, "Divine Hammer", one of his two painted signages

Mariano Ching, "Divine Hammer", one of his two painted signages

University, seem at first in direct opposition to his preoccupation with science fiction and apocalyptic images.  Yet, this dichotomy actually makes him more interesting.

I love his wall-bound sculpture, what he calls painted signages.  Manufactured from metal sheets, laser cut and shaped with precision, he paints them as he would his canvases.  They come out not only so well-fabricated, he has made them so distinctly his own.

Mariano Ching, "Great Deeds"

Mariano Ching, "Great Deeds"

View of the exhibit installation

View of the exhibit installation

Dead Ends And False Starts by Mariano Ching runs from 15 July to 8 August 2009 at SLab, 2F YMC Bldg. 2, 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati City.  Phone (632)816-0044 or visit http://www.slab.silverlensphoto.com

Mariano Ching, "Mounds and Moles 7"

Mariano Ching, "Mounds and Moles 7"


America Ain’t That Sweet for Hannah Pettyjohn and Small Wonders at Mag:net Ayala

Hannah Pettyjohn, "DFW RIP (Urban Sprawl) and "American Mary"

Hannah Pettyjohn, "DFW RIP (Urban Sprawl)" and "American Mary"

AMERICAN SWEET BY HANNAH PETTYJOHN

A little more than two years ago, half- American Hannah Pettyjohn spent time in Texas to reconnect with her roots. While there, she worked at a geotechnical engineering lab, lived in a white house that looked exactly like all the other houses in the neighborhood, got to know her father’s family, and read David Foster Wallace. Continue reading →


Two Little Shows That Could: Patty Eustaquio at 20 Square and Felix Bacolor at Finale

Isn’t it great when you stumble on fantastic art when you least expect it?  Not all the hype guarantees a great show, so when you come upon shows that deliver the wow factor sans the ballyhoo and waiting lists, doesn’t that just make your day?

After Mme Moitessier as Bone China, The Edible Vase, and Miss Manners by Patricia Eustaquio

After Mme Moitessier as Bone China, The Edible Vase, and Miss Manners crochet scuplture by Patricia Eustaquio

Continue reading →


Bogie’s Loony Uncle

 

Jose Tence Ruiz Pila Baldessari and Blu Skreen Pila

Jose Tence Ruiz Pila Baldessari and Blu Skreen Pila

On the surface, Jose Tence Ruiz seems the most unlikely of guys to do a show on National Artist Fernando Amorsolo.  Although the 53-year–old multimedia artist studied art at a time when schools taught the Amorsolo template, Tence Ruiz, aka Bogie, cut his artistic teeth in the 70s, the decade of protests and revolutionary art.  His exaggerated, oftentimes grotesque, figures set in an explosion of junk or mired in muck, give harsh depictions of the underside of life in Manila.  He also did time as an editorial cartoonist, politics and governance serving sustenance to his art. To this day, Bogie remains a pillar of Social Realism, the opposite end of the spectrum from Amorsolo’s benign sunsets and fragile beauties.  

Once Isa Lorenzo had convinced Bogie to visit SLab, this exhibit  had metamorphosed from a one-piece show into

Paraisado Florida de Don Romantico

Paraisado Florida de Don Romantico

Bukod Tanging Pag-Ibig: A Don Fernando Register.  The exhibit’s title a literal and lyrical translation of the name amor solo from Spanish to Filipino. Not just my only love but the pinnacle of all loves. 

 

 

 

 

 

 “I see Amorsolo as a loony uncle you might snicker at, but cannot ignore.  He is part of my DNA”, declares Bogie.  After almost thirty years, Bogie can take a step back and react to his differences with Amorsolo’s visions of reality in a relaxed, even humorous, manner.  “His works haunted me, mahirap ipinta.” He labels Don Fernando a retinal genius, a cinematographer who can capture light like no other.  In this suite of twelve works, he dexterously puts together Don Fernando’s iconic images with his own signature tongue-in-cheek devices, bringing Amorsolo into the world of 21st century Philippines.

In three oil on canvas pieces, Mga Dalagang Bukid , Dalagang Bukid 1, and Prinsesang Bukid, he integrates Don Fernando’s most famous ladies with today’s realities: of bukids and rice fields transformed into golf courses and low-cost housing projects. The graceful damsels today burn from the rays of

Jose Tence Ruiz Mga Dalagang Bukie

Jose Tence Ruiz Mga Dalagang Bukid

a sun that penetrate a thinning ozone layer as they find employment as caddies, their parasols converted into golf umbrellas. In Takipsilim:  Dinadaga and Monumento sa Dalagang Bukid, Bogie takes Amorsolo Light into the evening, rendering two of Don Fernando’s most recognizable scenes under a cover of darkness, as if viewing with night vision goggles the images of a Manila ruined by war and a nipa hut on the edge of farmlands.

Jose Tence Ruiz Prinsesang Bukid

Jose Tence Ruiz Prinsesang Bukid

Bogie will not be Bogie without his social commentary. He conveys the common tao’s daily plight of never ending queues: for passports, for visas, for buses and jeepneys, even to get into variety shows like Wowowee.  The title Pila Baldessari is taken from both American conceptual artist John Baldessari’s wont to conceal his subject’s faces with colored shapes, and also from the colloquial term pilang balde. For that dose of relevance, Bogie uses forms that mimic Bayani Fernando’s MMDA Art as face covers.  

 

Jose Tence Ruiz Oil/Painting

Jose Tence Ruiz Oil/Painting

The pieces, though, that have Bogie’s hallmark through and through are the work on canvas of an oil rig that blights Manila Bay’s famous sunset, amusingly entitled Oil/Painting, and the show’s two sculptures, Paraisado Florida de Don Romantico and Ube.  The kariton as both cathedral and conveyance has been used by Bogie before.  This time he amorsolo-fies this, covering the wooden piece under layers of silk flowers set in resin, beautifying an otherwise bleak structure.  

 

Ube, a free-standing piece made of resin, pays tribute to the deliciousness

Jose Tence Ruiz Ube

Jose Tence Ruiz Ube

of Don Fernando’s nudes, rosy-complexioned creatures, delectable as ice cream.  He turns once again to the MMDA for inspiration, coming up with the dull violet shade by combining the bright pink and blue strewn by the MMDA all over the metropolis.

 

Jose Tence Ruiz finds that responding to Fernando Amorsolo’s body of work does not detract from the understanding of his own.   Just as it is with that loony uncle that hovers in the sidelines of family gatherings, in the end, he discovers that they can sit down and grab a beer together.  And it sure tastes good.

 

Bukod Tanging Pag-ibig:  A Don Fernando Register is on exhibit from February 18 to March 21, 2009 at Slab, 2f YMC Building 2, 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati City, Phone 816-0044. There will also be two artist talks by Jose Tence Ruiz on March 7 and 21, 2009 from 3 to 5 pm.  Visit www.slab.silverlensphoto.com.