Blanc Compound (35)
The Jungle and the Rain
Gray is the color of lingering malaise, of semidarkness and the approaching storm. It is the soul-deadened hue of concrete, the monochrome of drudgery. In The Jungle & the Rain, Renato Barja Jr. uses the overcast sky as his palette as he paints and sculpts the misery of the urban everyman. And yet, cutting through the cloud bank are flourishes of color—oranges, reds, and aquamarines—that illuminate his art like brief flashes of lightning.
Barja’s characters are real. He collects faces while he sits in cabs and buses, and uses the cityscape that rushes past moving windows as his storyboard. While walking through the streets and alleyways leading to his studio, he senses the quiet desperation of the people around him and captures the stale scent of their dead-end lives in his work.
Exposing the underbelly of society has always been Barja’s concern. He possesses a thematic kinship to Edward Hopper, who said that he painted “the loneliness of a large city.” Where Hopper’s muses were sad cigarette-smoking clowns and apathetic diners, Barja empathizes with “discarded individuals.” This exhibition is his continuing ode to rugby boys and town crazies, to butchers and cuckolds, to the mass of humanity struggling to cope with its insignificance.
For Dear Life
'The eagerness of a soul’
Acceptance is the last stage of grief. In For Dear Life, Mark Andy Garcia shares the most recent pages from his visual diary. The images reflect his mental and emotional state several years after personal tragedies overwhelmed him, the foremost of which was the death of his father.
Grief comes in waves. It is not one long sob that ends in silence but a series of unexpected paroxysms. For Dear Life offers 50 sketchbook-paper size drawings that revisit depression, sorrow, and a confusion of other feelings.
A continuation of the artist’s autobiographical art, this exhibition was created from a mature perspective that has been allowed time and distance to understand. The wounds are healing and Garcia is at liberty to examine them in a more detached manner. The raw anger and violence of Under the Watchful Eyes, his 2009 exhibition, has given way to introspection.In between exhalations of mourning, he allows his mind to wander to the most random of subjects. A glance out a window yields a sketch of a man on a bicycle; a conversation, in turn, begets a hypothetical answer to a rude observation; ruminations on his favorite artists inspire tributes to Auguste Rodin’s nudes, Edvard Munch’s expressionist explorations of the soul, and Vincent van Gogh’s spirituality as captured in deathbed portraits by Dr. Paul Gachet.
Garcia’s sketches are a revelation. They possess a kind of luminous straightforwardness not usually found in his heavily layered oil paintings. Drawn in an unpremeditated manner, these works on paper were created with whatever was available at that instant, at the precise moment of thought.
There was seldom any break between conception and creation. Experimenting with ink, charcoal, watercolor, and several combinations of these media, Garcia records the meanderings of his mind. Using his fingers and hands to spread the paint, he emphasizes the childlike nature of his art. His stream-of-consciousness scribbles remain, providing cryptic clues to the inner workings of his brain.As a result of his Garcia’s playful artistic experimentation, For Dear Life possesses a variety heretofore unseen. My Mother, a dark seated portrait bathed in shadows, was done charcoal. A sketch of van Gogh, eyes closed and close to drawing his last breath, was done in ink (just like Gachet’s drawing). As Old as the Hills is a sensitive autumnal watercolor and Like a Drowned Rat is a frenetic layering of everything he could lay his hands on.
Garcia’s free and spontaneous strokes mirror his rapid speech. Instinct guides his hand in his sketches as it does in his paintings. The culmination of the artist’s freewheeling process is I Clung to the Tree for Dear Life, an oil-on-canvas measuring 8x8 feet.
A devout Christian, Garcia is aware of the importance of trees in Christianity. At the center of the Garden of Eden stood both the Tree of Knowledge, which bore the forbidden fruit that tempted Adam and Eve, and the Tree of Life, described in the book of Revelation as bearing 12 crops of fruit and having leaves for the healing of nations.Garcia has never shied away from injecting spirituality into his work. His first solo exhibition, so near, yet so far (2008), featured paintings that referenced Biblical passages and carried titles like Crucifixion and The Whole Armor of God.
I Clung to the Tree for Dear Life affirms that Garcia is as steadfast in his faith as ever, despite tragedy. Like van Gogh, whom he considers the paragon of enlightenment, Garcia sees the divine in nature. Where van Gogh painted sunflowers and star-spangled skies, Garcia paints the rocks and rivers of the verdant earth in this exhibition’s centerpiece.Using a bristle brush attached to a piece of wood, Garcia creates a landscape populated by human beings in different stages of spiritual life. His palette is noticeably lighter, a choice meant to communicate that he has dived into the dark ocean and emerged a changed man. Swift, expressionistic strokes churn on the canvas and recall the layered aesthetic of Georg Baselitz.Garcia fits all the sentiments of his sketches into this one painting of a lush and dreamy island. In his letters, van Gogh wrote that he painted to “say something comforting.” Likewise, Garcia wishes “to express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.”—ll
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No Past No Present: Lao Lianben launches new collection and book
A deep, contemplative stillness pervades his works, which are veritable Zen-scapes. Consistently abstract, a minimalist character informs his meditations on the conceptual ideas of space, silence, light, enigma, and emptiness. Disdaining the allure of polyphonic and cosmetic colors, he imposes on himself the discipline of the non-colors black and white, and the varying tonalities of grays. Materiality and tactility directly appeal to his viewers' sense of touch, provoked by his masterful manipulation of thick impastos and rough-hewn surfaces.
For over four decades, the works of Lao Lianben have cast an irresistible spell, creating for the artist an identity shrouded by distance and inaccessibility. Resolutely resisting the attraction of changing artistic idioms and movements, Lao Lianben trekked an individual path.
Blanc presents Lao Lianben's recent creative production in a solo exhibition billed as "No Past, No Present", the title references the Zen term for enlightenment, satori, "in which one sees that both time and substance are illusory." Deviating from his previous large scale format, the artist engages his attention with the diminutive, initiating a series of works that uniformly measure barely a square foot. Impressively, however, their modest size does not detract from their palpable presence and communicative strength. The show assembles exactly a hundred of Lao Lianben's new works.
Coinciding with the exhibition is the gallery launching of a coffeetable book memorializing the event. The book reproduces all the artworks in their actual sizes, written by noted art critic Cid Reyes, photographed by ace lensman Neal Oshima and designes by Aman Santos.
No Past No Present opens on Sunday 3PM March 13, 2011 at Blanc Compound, 359 Shaw Boulevard, Mandaluyong City. For further enquiries, please call telephone numbers 752 0032/+63920 927 6436 visit www.blanc.ph or email
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MANO MANO:
THE HERMIT AND THE JUGGLER
The show of hands is called for here: hands as exponents of mind and labor, hands as exponents of vista and scrutiny. Mike Adrao and Iggy Rodriguez are reunited in this exhibit by a shared passion for drawing and its demands on technique and material. Yet this is less about the spectacle of double-billed dexterity, even if assuredly, both artists have the acumen to exhibit this. Rather, Mano Mano, is an arena of pointed readings, of reality conveyed by two perspectives of critique-- where one turns inward to escape chaos and ventures to look out; while the other can be said to be immersed in the same chaos and decides to close in on its interiority. And both are political stances indicative of the artist’s recourse to utilize and make sense of discord.
There is a strong catechistical influence to these works, veering to a subjectivity that proffers the material figure as representation of inner or spiritual states. Realism is ascribed by approaching the figurative within the device of the tableau, such that even with distortion and cropping, the image is consciously framed or staged within the coordinates of the iconographic narrative. The sacred is device appropriated to the idea of transfiguration as consequence: the body is modified and distorted, identities are taken over, and nature is in a state of decline and decay.
Two archetypes may be recalled to aid these existential readings. In the major arcane of the Tarot, the first card is the Juggler, sometimes referred to as the magician. The Juggler is equipped; his table is laid with the objects of his fancy. His hands hold the tools for both earthly and heavenly enrichment. Yet this is the card that suggests humanity’s existence as actors mindlessly plodding on in situations, where carnal delights are distractions from achieving a higher consciousness. Rodriguez approaches his critique of conspicuous oppression as a circus of absurdities, laying out the victims’ happy complicity with their exploitation. The play of power is most obvious in Coming of Age and Delusions of Grandeur, where the rulers who hold the reins on their playthings have no awareness of their own perpetual ruin.
The other card is the Hermit, the figure that states existence as a quest in eternal solitude. The Hermit holds both the lamp of enlightenment and the staff of stability. He is certain about his inner path, only that his progress is hindered because he is stuck to the past. Adrao is just as sure of his inward solitary gaze, as he revisits classical and Renaissance figuration and proceeds to reveal the organic and mechanical transmutations within. His Mekanismo and the smaller DeMekaniko series are intrinsic steps to a process of ‘decomposition,’ where inner lives are bogged down by material concerns, suggesting an existence ruled by maggots and the slither of cold-blooded creatures. These are passive lives lived to clocks with rusty cogs and wheels ticking in reverse.
Hence, the match acted out in Mano Mano addresses and pits the adversaries within, alternately revealed by sleight of hand and careful probing. However, this is just another session, another set of readings. Cards do not carve destinies. For that we look to hands propelled by the conscious will to vanquish the death of the spirit.
-Karen Ocampo Flores
If You Fall, You Fall Alone
Allan Balisi paints sadness — not histrionic fits that demand an audience but intimate moments of anguish that occur when no one is looking. His melancholy is the kind that descends on you during the witching hours, when no one else is awake and the world is awash in black and gray. Without revealing many details, he creates poignant stories that slowly drown you in desolation.
In If You Fall, You Fall Alone, he presents five major monochromatic canvases with subtle hints of blue, green, and brown, and a series of smaller works colored in the same muted palette. His paintings, clean and uncluttered, do not confuse the eye with superfluous embellishments.
There is no narrative arc. Each piece is a plot unto itself, open to solitary introspection aided only by cryptic titles. The show coheres because of the emotional resonance of each work. They all feel the same and the nostalgic effects of Balisi’s paintings linger like the smell of rain on a gray day.
If You Fall, You Fall Alone will open on Friday 6pm October 15, 2010 at blanc compound Shaw.
For more information please email
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or call/sms +63920-9276436.
The exhibition will run until November 5, 2010.
"Penumbra Anino Shadowplay Collective"
A company like ANINO, constantly dealing and coping with such stark contrasts as light and shadow or dark, traditional and innovation, fortune and misfortune, success and failure is expected by many to be more committed in its politics and it’s art. And many end up frustrated with it. Arms akimbo, they demand, “What is ANINO about anyway?” With this art collective’s now classic answer of “nothing, anything and everything”, they end up either loving or hating the collective and its work.
Perhaps, for ANINO, the problem lies in that its chosen art form drives it towards the world of dreams and yet the harsh realities of its milinieu claims its attention. And, rather than taking one and forsaking the other, the collective attempts to marry the two. If hindered, it opts for the middle ground – the grey area.
What interests the collective the most are the grey areas of life- questions begging for answers, concepts waiting for definition. Philippine shadow play, because it is non-traditional to the country and little known as yet, is one big grey area. To develop it, the group takes its cue from Philippines culture itself. That is to say ANINO went for hybridity, invention, resourcefulness and an organic process.
Organic in the sense that plans, concepts, designs, even techniques are adjusted or abandoned as necessary according to the rhythm and realities faced, all the while bearing out beauty by marrying the two opposite yet complimentary concepts of freedom (to play and experiment) and disciplin
March Connections
Melvin Culaba in Connections
Melvin Culaba’s collection of recent works entitled “Connections” tackles on how each and every detail of a painting or of life in general would fall into place to assemble into one important event in a person’s life. According to Culaba, “Lahat ng bagay ay nagtatagpi-tagpi para mailagay tayo sa dito at ngayon. Lahat ng elemento na nangyayari sa kanya-kanyang buhay at lahat ng elemento sa isang piyesang biswal ay nangyayari at naroroon dahil sa dahilan na hindi pa natin alam, ngunit parating may dahilan”
And true to his patriotic form, Culaba would like to shake his viewers into realizing the obvious, that each of us would need to our part for the growth of the country. Every individual counts, every action leads to another.
“Connections” opens on Friday March 13, 2009 6PM at the blanc compound. The blanc compound is located at 359 Shaw Blvd. Mandaluyong city. For more information please visit www.blanc.ph or www.blancartspace.multiply.com email
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call/sms 752-0032/0920-9276436. The show will end on April 3, 2009.
"TutoKKK: Krisis, Kalunasan... Anong K Mo?"
TutoK is about visual artists collaborating for advocacy. In celebration of its third year this 2008, it is holding its annual exhibit at Blanc's spaces in Mandaluyong and Makati with almost 200 artists contributing new works on the theme of crisis: probing into its metaphors and transmutations as it collectively forms an active stance beyond resistance.
Primarily conceived as a recount of a crisis-laden period, "TutoKKK" is also an invitation towards a more in-depth scrutiny of pressing issues. Crisis marks a point of instability in the same way that it highlights a turning point: we are in a crucial moment where decisions will and have to be made.
Paintings, sculptures, installations and residual performance comprise the initial salvo to be held at the Blanc Compound in Mandaluyong from November 25 to December 10. A flow of wall-bound works in uniform format will dominate the space, interspersed with sculptures and assemblages of objects that overall, will interact with the action and residue of live art performances. The high point will be an Artists' Reception on Sunday, November 30 with performances and other events starting at 4:00pm. The party will go on till evening with music provided by various bands.
Coming next is an installation of works on paper by the same artists at Blanc Art Space Makati from December 6 to 31. Using various media, but also following a uniform format, these vignettes on crises will also be the basis of an installation/performance that will echo the outcry and ephemera of paper. The exhibit will open on Saturday, December 6 with performance starting at 7:00pm.
"TutoKKK" is presented in partnership with Blanc, and is jointly curated by Noel Soler Cuizon, Buen Calubayan, Jef Carnay, Mark Salvatus and Wesley Valenzuela. TutoK is grateful to PAG-IBiG, Utterly Art, and Mr. Julius Babao for their support.
