Wataru Sakuma, "Roxas Blvd" at Map, Art Informal
Doing the rounds of galleries gave way to other projects these past few weeks, but this weekend proved a good time to catch up on Manila’s offerings: Continue reading
Jose John Santos III, "Clockwise", detail
While briefing the press right before officially opening the doors to ArtHK 12, Magnus Renfrew, fair director, announced that beginning next year, Art Basel officially takes over the Hong Kong art fair. Henceforth, it shall be known as Art Basel Hong Kong, the third fair in the franchise after the original Art Basel (the one that actually takes place in Basel) and Art Basel Miami Beach. Continue reading
Vermont Coronel, "Connection", detail, layers of painted stencils
Vermont Coronel has professed his admiration for Logan Hicks, the American stencil artist known for his detailed urban landscapes. Unsurprising then that he has chosen to work with the same medium: layers of meticulously fabricated stencils, traced from his own photos of random city scenes, translated to canvas via spray-painted acrylic. It takes a minimum of three layers of stencils to complete an image, and it takes Vermont a week to create each layer. Continue reading
John Frank Sabado, detail from pen and ink drawing, "No Tresspassing"
You can’t miss the allusion of the bulols in gas masks. To the indigenous tribes of the Cordilleras, the battle against over development never ends. John Frank Sabado, born in the forests of Benguet, feels this more keenly than most. Continue reading
Troy Ignacio, "All Mine"
Troy Ignacio considers himself a social realist. His distorted, caricature-like portrayals of the people he encounters daily belie the seriousness with which he views issues such as poverty and injustice. He has adopted a stark, black and white palette to underscore how ordinary and matter-of-fact we look at situations that should cause outrage. A little girl allowed by her parents to dress as scantily as the dancers on a daily television variety show, or an old man forced to eke out a living hawking cigarettes, have been some of the subjects rendered in his oil on paper paintings. Continue reading
I can’t remember the last time Kiko Escora mounted a solo exhibit. We’ve kept up to date with his work largely through The Drawing Room’s participation in art fairs and his own intermittent appearances in group shows around Manila. This one, then, is long overdue. Continue reading
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
Riel Hilario, "From The Wreckage, A Silent Reverie", detail
RIEL HILARIO, ASTRAL PROJECTIONS
Karl Jung defines projections as issues that our consciousness cannot face, concerns we may end up expressing via our dreams. Riel Hilario has mined this explanation, along with a youthful obsession for astronomy, to create two sets of works for Astral Projections, currently on view at The Drawing Room. The exhibit features his most recent series of sculpture, pieces that draw on his background as a wood carver from an Ilocano family of santo makers. This heritage continues to frame Continue reading
Diokno Pasilan’s art stems from his community involvement. He moved to San Vicente, Palawan in the late 1990s, a place he still visits every year, traveling annually from his current 
base of Perth, Australia. The core of works for Here, There, and Everywhere, now running at The Drawing Room, started out as a project in 2003 to provide senior citizens of the town with ID photos for their Philhealth cards. As evidenced in this exhibit, those seemingly innocuous photos make for forceful portraits. Diokno has blown up a selection, transforming what originally had been intended as run-of-the-mill identification tags into the mixed media wall-bound works he has now installed in the gallery. Continue reading
It must have been ages since Ronald Ventura mounted a show of mostly small works. We’ve come to associate his astronomical auction prices to equally colossal pieces. Whether or not he conceptualized his paintings and sculpture for Converging Nature with an eye towards making them accessible to his Manila collectors, I thought that their scale worked very well with the gallery’s space. I even felt that his bond paper-sized paintings trumped his bigger ones in terms of subject and detail. 
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