The Big and Small Art Co. proudly presents "TECHKNOW." This is the first solo exhibition of Derrick Macutay whose works have evolved from the thematic rural to the more insightful theme on humanity and technology. The montage of curated works combined establishes a dream-like nightmarish environment and co-existence of automatons, cyborgs and machines. It portrays visions of biomechanical humanoids.
Much influenced by the Swiss artist Hans Rudi Giger, Macutay’s figures and characters render a pictography of the current and a vision of what is beyond, via a portal or a gateway to the future; much to the preoccupation of the current generation in the latest in technology. Such can be vividly perceived in the piece “The Machines Are With Us, In Us.” And the awe and wonderment of a younger generation, suggesting altogether a future that is breathtaking and full of promise is all bound by the dictates of mechanical cables in the work “Fly Away Icarus.”
Macutay’s oeuvres clearly portrays the decay of what lies ahead and yet there is this aesthetic that thrusts the works to an echelon of that elegant beauty and the transcendent revelation of something wonderfully alien. The centerpiece of the exhibit is his painting “Ecce Homo Technologous” that won him a Jury Prize in the recent concluded Philip Morris Art Awards. Dr. Patrick Flores notes on the piece, “Behold the Man, Thus says Pilate when he presents Christ to the populace. There is persecution in this intricately textures and well-wrought painting. Half human, half automaton, the cyborg survives in an atmosphere of fumes and the toxic hues of ominous blue. In this brave new world of hypermedia and cyberspace, he is fastened to and enslaved by the machine, ensconced on a toilet seat, the data base of his embodied, dehumanized existence.”
Macutay’s pieces are a testament to the human imagination. Only the then-President of the Czech Republic and renowned playwright Václav Havel could have given a hopeful description of the postmodern world as one based on science, and yet paradoxically “where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.”
In this post-postmodern arena of visual arts where artistic revolutions are made by a few key individuals and wherein at the heart of every revolution is an artist who achieves originality, Macutay presents a novel theme, employing the inventive use of composition, figure, and color to mark a beginning.
"TECHKNOW" opens on Wednesday, November 26, 2008, 6:00 p.m. at The Big and Small Art Co., located at The Artwalk, Level 4 Building A of the SM Megamall, Ortigas Complex, EDSA, Mandaluyong City. The exhibition will run until December 5, 2008.
Opening Cocktails: November 26, 2008
Wednesday, 6PM
