Kaida Gallery in Quezon City will be featuring two back-to-back solo exhibitions, Up Ko Lang by Dansoy Coquilla and Krusada by Tomas Daquioag from June 22 to July 9, 2008.
Both exhibitions are by painters whose works have largely focused on depicting the realities of contemporary Pinoy street life from a sympathetic point of view. The two shows will open simultaneously on June 22 (Sunday), 6 p.m., at Kaida Gallery, located at the 2nd Floor, GFO Building, 122 Kamuning Road, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines 1102. The shows run until the July 9, 2008.
Up Ko Lang is Dansoy Coquilla's 15th one-man show. Featuring the artist's latest oil-on-canvas works in Kaida's Main Gallery, Up Ko Lang is a collection of the artist's renderings of contemporary Philippine street scenes in his signature “top-view” perspective. Coquilla eyes activities and fads that have become commonplace among ordinary Filipinos but may border on the bizarre for those uninitiated with Pinoy popular culture: scenes from pabasa Lenten rituals mix with images of “Emo” kids and Dance Revolution moves, habal-habal tricycles from Mindanao stand side by side with paintings of ordinary folk having coffee in the marketplace.
Daniel Coquilla recently wrapped up with a one-man show at the Utterly Art Exhibition Space in Singapore. Coquilla took up his art studies at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine Arts. He also garnered two Juror's Choice awards in the 1997 Philip Morris 4th Philippine Art and ASEAN Art Awards. He was a recipient of the University of the Philippines Gawad Chanselor Para sa Sining Biswal Award in 1998 and the Philippine Winner for the Windsor and Newton Worldwide Millenium Painting Competition in 1999. In 2005, Coquilla was named as one of the Thirteen Artists Awardees by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Coquilla took up his art studies at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine Arts. To date, he has held solo and group exhibitions in venues such as the GSIS Museo ng Sining, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, UP Vargas Museum, Bangladesh Art Museum, and the Ayala Museum. The artist is currently affiliated with the UP National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (NISMED).
The exhibition entitled Krusada by Tomas Daquioag hangs in the Gray Wall of Kaida Gallery. According to the artist, the show was inspired from the Invincible exhibition held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) last October 2007. The works depict the “realities of daily life with a touch of fantasy”.
The show juxtaposes images of the local lumpenproletariat relegated to the periphery of society—people largely unseen because ignored, unrecognized because undocumented. Daquioag casts a sympathetic eye towards the so-called classless class: street vendors with no business permits and workers with no TIN numbers and legal papers who live below the poverty line and existing in a world where the survival of the fittest is the law of the land.
Daquioag's works address the crusade against starvation despite the state of misery that they wallow in, day in and day out. He attempts to break figurative painting conventions by infusing fantasy fiction and comic-style illustrations into realistic subjects and execution. The artist chooses to re-present and re-cast the masses in images of colorful attires associated with superheroes, in the attempt to resituate their plight and their sacrifices. Daquioag believes that there is a need for them to be identified and be recognized as part of the social economy, to magnify the “incredible resilience of body, heart and spirit of the underprivileged”.
It is in this sense that Daquioag titles his exhibition as Krusada: a crusade to represent and redepict, a movement to defend the hard-edged realities of the poor from dissipating into ignorance and into oblivion.
Tomas Daqiuoag recently wrapped up with a successful residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States and a series of one-man art exhibitions – Hero”(ARIAS, Makati City), Close Encounter (Vermont Studio Center, Johnson Vermont, USA), and Discombobulating Images (Philippine Center, New York, USA).
Kaida Gallery is an art space devoted to showcasing works by contemporary Philippine artists. Established in 2006 in Quezon City, Kaida Gallery features young, dedicated, and emerging painters and sculptors as well as supporting collaborations between them and established names in Philippine art. For inquiries, please call (632) 4144777 or write info@kaidagallery.com.
