Fred Failing
November 4 – 13, 2022
Arte Bettina
3rd Level, Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center 1224 Makati, Philippines
There is a distant look in the eyes of the figures in Ferd Failano’s paintings, as if they are tracing through their sight the outline of objects they so desire, tucked away beyond their reach. They languish, as they become unraveled by loss, and longing.
The landscapes in the painting look like patchworks. The mountains transition into buildings. A man sitting by a bonfire has been placed into the composition like a collage material. Hands bearing flowers float mid-air. The scenes presented to us by the artist are made up of fragments from different times and places, with the people appearing to be caught in these montage-like liminal spaces.
Yoalli Rodriquez, an educator and writer described grief as “another ontological form of time”. When one grieves, time becomes slow, shapeless, and nonlinear, allowing for a deeper time experience that may feel specially arduous and painstaking.
For Failano, his works are his response to the precarity, dysfunction, chaos, and systematic neglect that had put our lives into a halt the past 2 years, resulting in feelings that are typically seen as unproductive under the lens of an extractive, capitalistic society: grief, sorrow, longing.
When we grieve, may it be for people we lost or for lives we were unable to live, we cocoon ourselves and treat mourning as a private matter, as if it was something to be hidden away from others. Folding into ourselves, we keep the ways our sorrow undo us concealed within the confines of our intimate lives.
– Kath Nuñez
