One Way: Route to Resilience

Featuring works by Allan Alcantara, Aaron Bautista, Carlos Totong Francisco II and Isidro Jon Santos.

Allan Alcantara is an artist working on different media in his works. He uses numerous materials and unifies them allowing it to present the overall composition of his works which in turn enables him to deliver the cunning messages, which are not just narratives but clues enmeshed and jumbled in an entangled web of strong and confused lines, form, and color. He’s been been influenced by diverse sources in the local art community, culture and music. Most of his artworks depict memories of the past, nostalgia, personal experiences, as well as expression of emotions and aspirations. His experimentations never depart from his way of making art in a spontaneous manner. Vivid colors, sharp strokes, and conceptual thoughts make up the details in order to provide audiences with a glimpse of what’s in an artist’s mind.

Aaron Bautista is a painter, art teacher and barangay councilor of Brgy. Poblacion Ibaba in Angono. He received from the Municipality of Angono the ‘Natatanging Mamamayan’ award for excellence in art in 2012. He has held 14 solo exhibitions since 2001 in various galleries in Angono, Manila and abroad. He was a resident artist of the Neo-Angono Artists Collective with Taring Padi Art Exchange Program in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2012. He was also a participant of Art Dialogo art exchange project which exhibited in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2016.

Aaron’s geometric patterns and curvilinear shapes, minimalist, saturated and colorful abstract and conceptual works – inspired by American artists Sol Lewitt and Frank Stella – have been conceived by his meticulous choice and deep thought; an insight he has gained from Lewitt’s credo: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Carlos Totong Francisco studied Fine Arts at the University of Santo Tomas and the grandson of Angono’s renowned muralist Botong Francisco. A versatile artist. During his childhood years that Regionalism was inherent if not diversified in this small town that the most of the painters were doing local subject in the manner of aforementioned National Artist. These were the simple realism and comprehensible premise with the essence of nostalgia in the fast-paced channeling urbanization. Everything’s departed now if we happened to take a stroll in this town near lakeshore that somehow produces exceptional individuals with the likes of Maestro Lucio San Pedro, National artist for Music.

This is where the ground that Totong led himself to invoke and search for his own personal style. He had joined local art groups and participated in numerous exhibitions around the country. He also facilitated some art workshops for children. His body of works includes representational aspect from positive images but he also embarked to test the other side of territorial landscape of the subconscious. His themes evoke different ways of interpreting the festive substance somehow dwells on the visceral, symbolical, transitional and the metaphysical.

Isidro “Manong Jon” Santos is the founder of KUTA Artists Group composed of modernist and experimental painters in Angono. As part of the third generation of Angono artists, Manong Jon continuously experiment on the bounds of his artwork. Sometimes visually arresting, his works are a window to this artist’s mind and imagination. Since 2000, he has held at least 10 two-man shows and joined more than 50 group exhibits in galleries such as Blanc, Nineveh Art Space, Kaida Contemporary, and Cultural Center of the Philippines, among others.

Writer Ian Lomongo describes Manong Jon’s works as “random and free-flowing abstract forms that coalesce into some dimly-lit and vaguely identifiable image coming out of the haze. Sometimes, they would be intimations of something ethereal and hanging in the air. Other times, they would be as palpable and visceral as spilled blood congealing, or the innards hanging out, or gray matter dashed to the ground. It’s as if his abstractions themselves were crossing, transgressing the very boundaries of abstractions, and were becoming figurative… as it were, desirous of some ‘Transfiguration’ themselves,” Ian said.

ONE WAY: Route to Resilience exhibit opens at 3pm, Sunday, November 22, 2020. A ‘Bisperas ng Fiesta’ or what most locals say ‘pagsalubong’ on the celebration of Angono’s town fiesta on November 23.