May 27 – June 25, 2024
OMVI ART Gallery
We have much to thank in this recent wave and ongoing wave of decentralization that has been happening in the Philippine art scene. While there has been an ebb and flow of in this sort of movements in the past, nowhere in time has these shifts been so active and pervasive. These recent turns of aggressive decentralization have seen the active rise and formation of artist-run spaces, off-the-grid micro art communities and artistic-cultural hubs and more art galleries in various regions and provinces including Iloilo, Baguio, Cavite, Laguna, Palawan, Tarlac, Bacolod and elsewhere. Nonetheless, this counterbalance is a welcome development, and this group show is an expression of these ongoing shifts.
“Blossom” as declared earlier, entertains a simple artistic goal: to create a lively and potent dialogue and collaborative means for both artists from the regions and those from the Greater Manila area to work together. The decision to showcase this combination of Manila based artists and those from the regions is more than intentional, the show sets out to counter the notions of the art capital or a singular geographic bias in terms of artmaking in the country and offers a common ground and a horizontal space to express narratives from everywhere. It also fittingly subscribes to the mission and concept of OMVI art to champion regional artists and open avenues for more inclusivity and the need for plurality in the country’s artistic landscape.
Audiences are treated to a survey of disparate artistic interests coming from different locations and developed art practices that are far from a single homogeneous center. In doing so, this dialog of artworks and artists locates the connections and exchanges from among various artistic strands while turning off privileged notions of hierarchy and boundaries and to revisit the contexts and artistic premises that inform their work. It could also be read as a map which can aid our search for links within artistic expressions, lived experiences, language of ideas and how particular localities shape these artists through their aesthetic choices. It reinforces and raises the idea of evenness where perceived peripheries and center are blurred.
By offering this act of diversity, the show confronts the norm to see and appreciate art from a single gaze of what is dominant and better and therefore, dissolving the regional boundaries and hierarchies that have pervasively been the order in the way we look at art, how they are produced and valued resulting from the monolithic art centers/markets– in our case, Manila. Additionally, by extension it also recognizes the communities of burgeoning collectors, donors and supporters who aid this artistic ethos.
The show includes the works of Sariel Ancheta (Pangasinan), Juert Asejo (Bulacan),
Judeo Herrera (Tarlac), Dante Enage (Leyte), Bastee Orobia (Muntinlupa), Fernando Ramos (Tarlac), Wellers Vicencio (Mandaluyong) and Yelcast (Batangas).
THE ARTISTS
Fernando Ramos’ artworks capture the symbiosis and interconnectedness of man and nature. By framing foliage and human subjects, he calls to mind the many common processes and dynamics that humans and their environments share together: rooting, sprouting, branching, flowering, or bearing fruit which are metaphors of being and becoming and which also tightly speak to the overarching theme of the show. We only grow if we seeded in the right nurturing places. Bastee Orobia patently introduces a representation of a full bloom and as though it’s on fire. It’s a fiery kind of full bloom in moments before petals give way to a seed demonstrating a peak before completing its own act of generative obligations.
For his part, Dante Enage’s paintings do flit between stark figurative elements, solid graphic motifs and components and a play of patterns and geometric imports: his modes to pursue ideas of colors, shapes, and figuration. These cohere together in overlays of diaphanous, pale and subdued palette mixed with vibrant color choices which carry his environmental undercurrents and themes. In this suite of works,
Yelcast on the other hand, offers the bloomiest of these representations. His painting is soaked and composed in graphically lush and vivid colors that seem to sprout out of envelopes. His paintings drip and bristle with colors like nobody else and sincerely extol the virtue and beauty of life through his visual narratives and aims through the interplay of texts and images. In the meantime, Judeo Herrera’s dreamy and surreal scenes of the juvenile feminine forms amid the stillness of active dreams and rituals evoke haze and revelation and hint many veiled intentions. Just like in dreams, the subjects are partly unrevealed, they are framed with recurrent devices of textural quality of thumbprints which adds to fixed yet evanescent glow and mystical evocation of his piece.
For Juert Asejo, he frames his work in relation to the show as the direct result of his self-awareness, his steady organic, free-flowing artistic process and pleasures derived from creative accidents. It is in this constant dialog and his predilection to spontaneity, mutability and complete submission to uncertainties and indecisions where he blossoms and thrives as an artist. Unabashedly, he is not afraid to reveal these clues in his work.
As humans, our relationship of nature has been a game of intervention. Out of solid slabs of wood or stone, Ancheta has since been using the rich fabric and vernacular of his mediums to create his work. Apart from his teeming art practice and creative engagements, he is partly dabbling in heritage conservation projects. Equally accomplished just like the rest of the artists in this grouping, Wellers Vicencio is one artist drawn to create images drawn to produce a range of subjects, styles and approaches from portraits, mood, nature, floral subjects. His early works were particularly approached and produced from brush strokes to palette knife and then to splatter-splash which later progressed to colored pencil works. He is also fascinated making old wood frames which he incorporates in his paintings.
-Philip Paraan
