Alcantara Bautista
Bautista Alcantara
March 5 – 31, 2021
Opening
Friday March 5 | 3 PM
ArtisteSquare Gallery
L2 Unimart Capitol Commons
Pasig , City
Dots and Lines Morphing into Shapes of Life
DUELO DE ESTILOS features the latest works of artists Rodolfo “Dolpee” Alcantara and Aaron V. Bautista, two of Angono, Rizal’s artists whose styles of pointillism and abstractionism are peculiar and unique in the context of Angono’s long tradition of figurative art expression.
Alcantara presents images that bind between mother and child to highlight the sense of warmth and security; women playing a violin and waiting for someone; birds, fish and butterfly on their natural habitat; a road scene unique in the Philippines; and the proverbial hope one gets from faith and spirituality in order to make sense of one’s place and beingness. Here, Dolpee’s color and spacing create a greater depth and tones as well as luminosity when viewed from a distance — which are products of tedious work, sophisticated creative process, and assimilation of chromatic range.
Bautista, on the other hand, presents “Mi Colorida Ciudad” series by portraying the colorful town of Angono whose people are known for keeping and protecting their long-held culture, traditions and festivities imbued with Catholic narrative.
The colorful stripes symbolize the artists from various creative expressions who continue to thrive and multiply in numbers through the years. The gray color on the foreground alludes to changes of landscape, even imbalance and displacement.
What we have in Bautista’s works are found objects like gold burlap cloth alluding to lost fields of golds which have been replaced by residential houses and quarry site; nails use for construction and infrastructure which are now redefining the town’s landscape and sprouting edifice; coins representing economic activity, and perhaps a warning over commercialism and materialism; and the black and white foreground suggesting a rural town which is now on the heels of development and change yet maintaining its colorful tradition and identity.
DUELO DE ESTILOS is an aggrupation of dots and lines morphing into strokes and shapes of living and of becoming.
Coupled with warm and vibrant colors, the artworks create dream-like scenes and illusion. That in the hands of these two artists, the subjects evolve and revolve as well as flow and move fleetingly and contiguously like particles, fluid in the space like molecules, translucent, ethereal yet vibrant and colorful to capture the temporal but remarkable celebration of familial emotions and slices of social life.
– Text by Richard Gappi
