Angelo Valmoria Roxas’ 2nd Solo Show
December 12 – 23, 2024
Artist reception
December 12, Thursday | 5 PM
Galerie Joaquin BGC
Ground Floor of One Bonifacio High Street Mall, 5th Ave. Corner 28th Street, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig
Tropical Gothic offers an accessible introduction into the visual art of Angelo Valmoria Roxas. The title, borrowed from a Nick Joaquin book, nods to a masterpiece that explores hidden desires and truths unspoken. Here, Valmoria seeks to highlight a collective, unspoken yearning for legitimacy within a colonized culture. His counterpoint is a distinctive blend of nostalgic portraiture and pop art, accentuated by a defiant, insistent playfulness.
The playfulness appears as a recurring twist, referencing a character, or an object really, from an 80’s American comic strip about high school life in a town called Riverdale. The referent is obscured by its diminished popularity thus iconicity strikes the viewer with an odd sense of arbitrariness.
More evocative than provocative, Valmoria’s recurring visual symbols are less disruptions and more subtle invitations—a suggestion, if you will—of his still-unveiled weltanschauung.
In Tropical Gothic, the artist depicts the mundane, drawn from his real and virtual encounters, and melds it with a pop-comic sensibility. The result is a unique blend of Filipino-ness woven with a rhetorical what if—a visual wink at contemporary Filipino life, bombarded as it is by hyped social media and fabricated histories
Exhibit text by @jimlibiran
