Art as autobiography and angst: old hat. While traces of the classic cliche of painting as a means of self-expression can still be found in much of contemporary art, one nonetheless feels a general shift from the personal to the formal--form finally preceding content in a radical erasure of authorial grandeur.
But this has wrought a pervading blandness too. In the popular galleries, always the antiseptic whiteness of various minimalisms and conceptualisms--that, or the exhausting candy colors of pop surrealism and the horror vacui of fantastic hyper-realism, sensual maximalisms that seem to be every young artist's flavor-of-the-month.
A space is being reclaimed by Allan Balisi, however: that of the lyrical yet detached autobiography. With "Spacing Out," his new one-man exhibition at Blanc which opens on September 8, he pieces together visual fragments and single-panel stories from the meta-narrative of his life--mostly from his childhood--juxtaposing them against each other to reconstitute himself as author.
In vivid yet subdued textures, Balisi recounts moments from his past on canvas. But he does this not from memory but from found photographs, both familiar and otherwise. Using old family pictures as references, he doesn't put together narratives based on his life; instead, he puts together his life based on narratives derived from these pictures, with which he not so much discovers as he builds his own heritage.
This expulsion of the self is even furthered in the defamiliarizing gesture of consulting photographs not his own: Contemporary photographs culled from the Internet become models for reconstructing lost tales, such that the artist, in a sense, has consulted virtual strangers--random phantoms from online communities-- to tell him about his own life.
"Spacing Out" has the makings of a visual equivalent of an oral history--a graphic history from below vis-a-vis --and Balisi's exploration of his own life has, in turn, become an exploration of visuality's potential for historiographic potential.
"Spacing Out" opens on Monday, September 8, 6:00 pm, at the Blanc compound, 359 Shaw Blvd., Mandaluyong City. For details please call/sms 752.0032/0920.9276436, email info@blanc.ph or visit www.blanc.ph
Spacing Out
