Conversations with the artist and presentation of the video-catalogue by exhibition curator Sandra Palomar on Thursday 8 January 2009
Trek Valdizno’s body of work is the only one of its kind that can account for, if need be, a genre of lyrical non-objectivism in the history of modern art in the Philippines. As a student at the U.P. College of Fine Arts, he was executing drawings with remarkable ease, in astounding number and at an incredible pace that went beyond an academic exercise called “a hundred drawings.”
With at least one solo show and three group exhibitions annually in the past seventeen years, the local art scene has familiarized with Valdizno’s imagery, familiar enough for early opponents to lose interest in challenging his chosen visual language. But how much more palatable have his drawings really become to viewers who are quick to dismiss abstraction as mindless scribbling?
Valdizno is above all a master draftsman in a novel way. With his brush he is able to draw paint. This may be a way to begin appreciating his abstraction. In his work only paint exists and we are witness to what it can literally do. In spite of myriad interpretations aroused by his sumptuous vocabulary of forms and figures, what is essential in the artist’s laboring is the transfer of terrestrial vibrations to his matter.
For his 25th solo exhibition at the Artis Corpus Gallery, Valdizno’s stimulus comes from making images out of “cotton like buttons”. The preamble to this new body of work in contrast to the complexity of what the artist achieves cannot be any simpler or more banal, making it appear that he is quick to grab any motif if only to prod and probe his materials.
Much more than a materialist, he is not merely content attributing adjectives to paint. Paint must skid, slide, fatten, thin, glisten, fly, chatter, quiver, tumble, soften, harden, laugh and cry. Valdizno’s act of drawing is a vehicle to infuse paint with verbs that make it live and breathe as if human.
More innocently than idealistically, Valdizno allows his gestures to do everything to pigment creating a picture more delicious than candy. He waits patiently till the last minute for a crucial starting point that will allow him to draw for hours and days on end, spewing works by the hundreds, unapologetic of his abstractions done over and over again. He will even deliver his paintings wet. It is the only thing he can imagine doing very urgently.
Trek Valdizno’s URGENT exhibition opens on Sunday, 14 December 2008, at 4 pm at the Artis Corpus Gallery, 303 Haig Street Mandaluyong City. Exhibition runs till Friday 9 January 2009. Conversations with the artist and presentation of the video-catalogue by exhibition curator Sandra Palomar will be held on Thursday 8 January 2009. Interested parties may call 7174619.
