Opening
November 11, 2023 | 5 PM
Provenance Art Gallery
Shangrila Hotel at The Fort, 5th Avenue corner 30th Street, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig, Philippines
Never Wishy Washy
Wash Your Brush is the working artist’s battle cry as a well-thought-out encounter begins: on paper-, on canvas, amidst various found objects, or even strands of fiber painstakingly molded into shape according to the artist’s vision.
Here is where it all starts, with a fresh, clean brush and primed ground of choice, when an artist finally translates his studies, whether doodled on sketch pads, tablets, table napkins, shopping receipts, thoughts from the outer regions of one, brain, or responses to external stimuli that claw at the peripheries of existence, among the myriads of intentions.
From the animated strut of garapata-infested figures, a golden-hearted Christ with piercing eyes contrasting with the roughness of anatomy splayed, tender tendrils of tooled tomes that warm the hearth, combusted dust compressed into pierced forms, and a multi-layered serigraphic symmetry that offers luminance. A row of holy faces with fluid projections leads the eye to transmogrifying headspace. Dark sunflowers reminding us that there, still life and a mass of shadowy ghouls creating a Rorschachian image flank a caustic-textured head. An innocent figure is fishing, impending danger looming from a monstrous ambush, while an unidentified skydisc goes antigravity and turns aliens upside down. The glimpse of the city is sliced by the view of concrete walls and some plant life as a cat stands idly by, perhaps eyeing the remains of a saucy food fight. Golden orbs floating in auspicious configurations, disjointed limbs in striped stockings, and seeds planted on handmade paper almost bursting into the surface find space with the cyclical inevitability of mushrooms and spores in organic convolutions and lines in a collage reverberating and resonating in vibrant aqua and gold. A broken palaso with bent copper nails and stones in conversation with a commentary on the West Philippine Sea turns into a bloody polo sebo, as the multilayered splices of an interior scene offer solace. The exhibition boasts a diverse gathering of the irreverent, the remarkable, and the austere.
Wash Your Brush offers a unique opportunity to immerse the viewer and see each work as a means to grasp each artist, perspective, provoking thought and conversation. With all the talk about the newness and now-ness of what is contemporary, it is a refreshing reminder of what current art production is rooted in: an effusive, compelling need to make an object of hopefully enduring value, combined with the artists’ object-making skills, no doubt honed by years of sweat, heartbreak, sleepless nights, cramped hands, drained paint tubes, blunted pencils, and spatters of resin, oil, and dried watermarks on pigment-crusted studio floors. With these weapons in a practicing artist’s arsenal, additional fuel in the form of innate creativity and knowledge of the self in the context of history or even hysteria should be able to create a masterpiece, or at least, a piece of an artist’s soul.
Instrument encounters tabula rasa to At the process all over again. And as long as the artist, brush dips into clean water or thinner instead of a random cup of muddled coffee, it goes on.
Written by Kaye O’Yek
Featuring:
Arel Distor Zambarrano
Arturo Sanchez Jr.
August Lyle Espino
Ces Eugenio
Dex Fernandez
Diokno Pasilan
Don Djerassi Dalmacio
Froilan Calayag
Gerry Rafols Baguio
Joey Cobcobo
Kim Hamilton Sulit
Kim Lim
Linds Lee
Lotsu Manes
Mark Andy Garcia
Mimi Tecson
Neil Pasilan
Raffy Napay
Roedil Geraldo
Romeo Lee
Ryan Jara
Ryan Rubio
Wesley Valenzuela
