A solo exhibition by Robert Besana
Opens on March 22, 2019. Exhibit runs until April 10, 2019.
Galerie Roberto
Unit 4, Molito Lifestyle Extension Building, Madrigal Avenue corner Commerce Avenue, Alabang, 1776 Muntinlupa City
National Artist Vicente Manansala was reputed to have made a “panata” every Lenten season to paint a Crucifixion painting. This was his own personal vow and offering to his beloved wife Hilda, the woman who stood by the master through all the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of his life.
In like manner, artist Robert Besana undergoes a personal reflection on his own spiritual life, by subsuming into his art the narration of the Passion of the Christ, finding therein equivalences to his journey of faith and redemption.
In “Recollect,” Besana once again recreates and transforms some of the greatest masterpieces of Western art. Now unfurled at Galerie Roberto are Besana’s ambitious provocations of such works as Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ” and “The Conversion of Saint Paul.” Himself a hyper-realist, Besana revels in the pursuit of dramatic darkness, seemingly compelled to peel off the many layers of its depth. And what emerges in strategic areas are the luminous and radiant passages of gleaming light: the light emanating from the unseen heavens as Paul is flung off his horse onto the ground, or the lantern-light guiding the betrayer Judas towards the Christ.
In Besana’s Lenten works, the intensity of gloom is mitigated only by the pervasive presence of red roses, a favored symbolic image of the artist for a running decade, laden as it is with allusions to such grand human emotions as passion and violence. The paintings are set within a geometric grid, emphasizing the contemporary matter-of-factness of such ancient images, thus returning art to millennial times.
Surely, Besana’s artistic affiliation with the seventeenth century Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, must lie not only in his admiration of the impressive command of the brush, but also in the life of history’s original bad boy. In a brawl, Caravaggio once killed a man.
Like a stage director in precise depiction of emotionally charged events and situations, the artist seeks the immediacy of their aesthetic and spiritual appeal, invoking the viewers in the gloom of the Lenten season to redeem themselves from their fallen nature.
This is Robert Besana’s own “panata.”
– CID REYES
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For inquiries, you may contact: 809-1630 | 0998-595-5764 | 0905-314-6448 | galerie.roberto@gmail.com
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