Unscheduled Wanderings

Mai Saporsantos

May 14, 2019 at 8 PM – 11:59 PM

Mono8 Gallery
1335 Mabini St. Ground Floor, Manila, Philippines

Mono8 is proud to present “Unscheduled Wanderings”, the second solo exhibit of Mai Saporsantos with the gallery, featuring paintings immersed in the spirit of reverie, of wandering and discovery through the portals of reflection and transparency alongside the remembrance of time lost in the search of innocence and pure imagination. Not necessarily a narrative of sequential events, but rather a mise-en-scene on the interplay of everyday objects that portend of rituals and routines, perception and meaning, objective reality and inner subjectivity, magic and logic, serendipity and destiny, which herein encapsulates the spirit of alchemy – as above, so below; as within, so without; as with the universe, so with the soul (Hermes Trismegistus). Thus in the work of Saporsantos, the aspect of the inside and the outside echo one another: the mirror inside reflects the ambient space filled with tokens of the occupant’s being showing alongside the window on the wall leading to the world outside, bridging both realities; another interior consisting of things imagined and real: a person inside a canoe in motion of steering around the apparently vast and mysterious deep nonchalant of one’s inner projections over actual material and space; the sun’s simulacra across a piece of paper stuck in the middle of a window overlooking a placid sunlit sea that blurs the source of illumination, whether from the artist’s inspiration or from the sun itself; lastly, the figure as essential self cast amidst the vicissitudes of a tangible life, perilous for its inherent responsibilities and immediate consequences, and yet ultimately confident of its individuality and faith. Mai Saporsantos’ wanderings along the confines of inside and outside realities mimic her penchant for applying a personal style of representing things and what they might reasonably mean, landing simultaneously on the other side towards abstraction, which is the path unscheduled leading to the unknown.