Genre | Roberto Robles

Exhibit Run:
July 4-29, 2015

Galleria Duemila
210 Loring St., 1300 Pasay City

Genre, Roberto Robles’ solo show at Galleria Duemila dislodges from traditional facets of painting and sculpture formats, a permutation he calls “post-object”, in which familiarity to style classifications are modified, diluted, to a conflicting yet visually decisive investigations on aesthetic identity and growth. Attempting to tackle what art history has taught, his intent echoes the estrangement of artists to conformist forms beginning in the 60s.

In Genre, the walls are seamlessly hung with a selection of Robles’ striking reliefs—squares and rectangles of piercing yellow and orange, earthy brown and moss green. True to his form, everything is simple, modern, and spare as seen in fragile and seemingly discontinued sketches on white paper. While overlapping works on paper shows focus on materiality, in which kaleidoscope-like cutouts in blue paper reveal a pop of sharp tangerine. At approximately six by four feet, the main work Reciting Poetries, an off white Rauschenberg-esque relief bellies simple forms with dramatic combination of protruding surfaces of woodwork, paint, and squarish patches of tonal values in grey, black, and blue.

As with most of Robles’ work, his audience have seen, not just randomness, including debris on the street, could be the component of art, but that it could be the component of an art desiring to be attractive—that there is looming poetry even in consumer surplus, which the artist indirectly celebrates in his boxed works in the 80s and many other compositions from then and now.

Roberto M. A. Robles was educated in the Philippines and Japan. An accomplished artist, his work has been exhibited at Cultural Center of the Philippines, Vargas Museum, 17th Asian International Art Exhibition Daejeon Municipal Museum of Art; South Korea, Jiyu Group Exhibitions Tokyo Metropolitan Museum; Japan, and at Beaux Art L’art dans le Monde Pont Alexandre III in Paris, France. His oeuvre has been surveyed in a Retrospective show at the Ateneo Gallery in 2011. Genre runs from July 4-29, 2015 at Galleria Duemila.