VIC BALANON and ALLAN BALISI | There’s A Story Here Somewhere, It Got Lost Along the Way

Thursday, May 7
at 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Silverlens Galleries
2/F YMC Bldg 2, 2320 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, 1231 Makati

There’s A Story Here Somewhere, It Got Lost Along the Way

by VIC BALANON and ALLAN BALISI

7 May – 6 June 2015

Opening Reception
May 7, Thursday, 6-9PM

Silverlens is pleased to announce There’s A Story Here Somewhere, It Got Lost Along the Way, which pairs for the first time Vic Balanon and Allan Balisi who both appropriate imagery from film stills as a means to re-engage with this material and to instigate discourse on the malleable boundaries of pictured and mediated reality with personal and collective memory, consequently stringing narratives from these labyrinthine synapses of psychic and cultural connections.

We dream in pictures.

Watching a movie in the darkened halls of a cinema has often been said to be an activity of collective dreaming, moreover a refuge in tendering temporary isolation from the world, as we vicariously inhabit for a film’s duration our subconscious fantasies projected larger-than-life onto the amniotic screen. Thus, the cultural psychology of cinema as summarized by film critic Robert Eberwein : “Film’s overwhelming images invite a return to that state in which the ego dissolves.”

Film noir in particular is essentially oneiric in its prevailing and ominous settings of unending inky nights punctuated by smoke and shadows, and plots that dither in moral ambiguity and existential crisis as its characters are lured into desperate situations they almost always can barely escape from, often ending in murder and tragedy, still cloaked in feverish anxiety that weathers the whole film from the beginning.

And we know these, even by a single shot, or film still, by the wording of its titles, and even by their publicity poster lay-outs, we anticipate these things happening, as they are easily codified by its built in tropes, e.g. it’s always raining, there are trench coats everywhere, the protagonist is a private eye, someone is being framed, dialogue is replaced by smoking cigarettes, etc.

The sense of familiarity of the images used by Vic Balanon and Allan Balisi in this exhibit is supported by our ever increasing dependence or rather immersion in a visual culture (“One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. … everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumed…. Roland Barthes) that facilitates comprehension and memory retention as pictorial hieroglyphics, that remembering has become déjà vu encounters, with personal actual memories mingling with fictive filmic memories. Much of what remains in our memory determines how these resonates with us, what sort of meaning we’re able to deduce from the experience of watching certain films. Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein sums it up thus : “…every spectator, in correspondence with his individuality, and in his own way and out of his own experience… creates an image in accordance with the representational guidance suggested by the author, leading him to understanding and experience of the author’s theme. This is the same image that was planned and created by the author, but these images is at the same time created also by the spectator himself. “

But we are presented with film stills, sliced, cut from a long successive sequence of shots, presenting scenarios of purgatorial anticipation. Forensic detective work would be at play in deducing a narrative from the mise-en-scene of this single shot, comprising costume, setting , props, actors, lighting, camera angle, depth of field and space, all acting as referents to a speculated upon narrative.

Roland Barthes revels in the study and analysis of the film still that he infers that a single shot contains as much information and meaning as to the whole, for in this frozen frame more details are revealed, as active viewership is engaged in scanning fully a stilted frame. However, Barthes forewarns a caveat in this methodology : “we can only anticipate the meaning of an image, a meaning that is already past, perpetually deferred, and is yet to come.” Further, he reiterates this suspension of linear narrative and temporal time in film stills (being photographs in themselves) as having no future. Hence, no plot twist, no denouement, no climax, no resolution. As in Balisi’s anemically gray painting of a stage the curtain won’t ever rise, and in Balanon’s high key ink drawings where the destination of black suited men traversing wet cobbled roads of narrow alleyways would never be reached – all in a state of waiting : “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” ( Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

Leading us to ponder then if such a state of perpetual stasis is perfection itself, as text/narrative is reduced to an iconic image, in being its sole ideogram for a whole slew of layers of meaning a picture can invoke, as a map would easily be read/taken as the territory, in as much as the film The Third Man, which Balanon has used as one of his references, would be the definitive film noir picture.

The narrative superseded by this one image, the story getting lost somewhere in these labyrinthine synapses of collective dreaming.

Allan Balisi has consistently worked with found imagery, either screen captured from old Hollywood B-movies or scrounged from thrift shops around Manila. He likens the search for such images as a form of psychogeographic hunting/diving into this amniotic pool of pictures. Oftentimes, these images are selected for the anticipatory quality of a missing or lost element pointed out by the figures in the picture. In washed out gray monochromes, his paintings, diluted by mediation from his source material, become “ instructional diagrams to an exercise in viewing, before burdening them up with our mixed up fiction and projected valuation of its meaning, and confronts us to ponder instead on what do we really see and remember.”

Balisi had been exhibited at Blanc Gallery, Silverlens (MNL) and Richard Koh Fine Art in Singapore. He has been short-listed for the 2009 and 2013 Ateneo Art Awards.

Film, the process of making, and its consequent viewing and its cultural and psychological implications, is the very pulp of Balanon’s works which are a continuing discourse by a cinemaphile on the language and nuances of deriving meaning from such spectatorship. He interrogates such a discourse between the perception of images and how imagery aids with the construction of reality : “How is it that we remember things differently via images, from how they actually are? Why is it that images in our memories change over time?” – mirroring the experience of looking at old family photos, of making connections on a series of scenes in a silent film, of creating fictions out of seemingly disparate images. He begins this investigation with an early series The Nameless Hundred which takes after Max Ernst’s Hundred Headless Woman which are the collage equivalents of Eisenstein’s montage theory of film editing and storytelling. However, in appropriating film stills for this exhibit, Balanon has chosen to depict them verbatim in “reinvigorating a way of seeing that was once slow and deliberate” alluding perhaps to the long takes of filmic time.

Victor Balanon has worked as an illustrator creating artworks for film, independent comics and an underground music label. He later studied film and animation at the Mowelfund Film Institute in Manila, where he has produced two animated short films. During this time he also created a self-published comic-book anthology Quatro Comics and started working on his serialized pen and ink drawings. A self-taught artist, he was a part of the seminal late-90’s art collective Surrounded By Water, where some of the more prominent contemporary artists of today working in the Metro-Manila area have begun their practice. He has participated in various solo and group shows ever since, including group exhibitions in Hong Kong, San Francisco, Singapore and Tokyo, handling his time between his day job as a (hand-drawn) key animator and producing his own art. He was also a participating artist in the 14th Jakarta Biennale in 2011 with a collab work with Ferdz Valencia as The Crocogator. His works have also been collected by the Singapore Art Museum.

About Silverlens (Manila and Singapore)

Founded by Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo in 2004, Silverlens has earned recognition from both artists and collectors as one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Southeast Asia. Through its exhibition program, artist representation, art fair participation and institutional collaboration, Silverlens aims to place its artists within the broader framework of international contemporary art dialogue.