Wipo
March 25 – April 22, 2021
Gravity Art Space
1810 Mother Ignacia Ave, Diliman, Quezon City
How does one record the unsteady, often swift passage of time and keep track of the accelerating and decelerating momentum of our existence? Wipo visually outlines the days, months, and the previous year in a series of abstractions that illustrate the correspondence between particular moments and memory, the conscious and the unconscious— all underlying correlations and tensions in this new body of work.
In another solo presentation, the artist employs control and restraint, a slight diversion from spontaneity and automatism that are integral approaches to his artistic practice. “Traces of Memory ” translates graphical metrics generated from a performance tracking application he uses for running and turns them into hand drawings. Wipo prints data that correspond to each month, traces the ascent and descent of lines, and reproduces the image on paper using carbon transfer. He applies colors to carbon-copied graphs with water containing paint residues he used for washing his brushes. The reversal of image-making, from converting digitized images to drawings and paintings, reveals a more humanistic gesture rather than an artistic impulse alone, most evident in the irregularities of the visible line traces.
Wipo’s works speak of his meditations on linearity and movement: a straight line that appears to be flat and static may represent monotony, or an end, while a line with playful shifts, upward and downward, may articulate rhythm and reflex. Tempo presupposes that although time is given a definite form, measured and bounded by duration and units, it remains to be an open concept. Time has its own course, beat, pulse, and pace, and it sets one in motion to keep moving forward.
– James Luigi Tana
