RIDING IN CIRCLE:

A two-man show by Mac Valdezco and Eugene Jarque

In their two-man exhibition, Riding in Circle, Mac Valdezco and Eugene Jarque contemplate the cyclical nature of reincarnation, or the constant pursuit and rebirth of perfection in art. 

Valdezco’s biomorphic forms – hewn out of scrap cloth and cotton tape in previous lives – are reborn into thick fabric skins; sculptural pieces by needle and impasto. Her monoprints, the organic cosmos on paper by way of thread, reveal the spiral ascent of her textile works. The universe expands and contracts in Valdezco’s body of work, and patterns recur with the desire to alter and refine past discoveries. 

Jarque’s bold aluminum geometric structures, in parallel, progress in dimensionality. Painting gives way to form and structure, with the artist’s sculptural pieces elevating acrylic, aluminum, lead, and wood fragments. The richly textured multimedia abstractions retell social realities in bits of paper, soil, enamel, gesso, and metal etched with acid. Beyond canvas or paper, Jarque’s work embodies cultural transmissions of physical and immaterial worlds, and the indestructibility of pure artistic inspiration. Joined by an evolving consciousness, Valdezco’s assemblage and Jarque’s mixed media works are the constructs of a cyclic artistic existence. Riding in Circle is a fraction of an endless continuum – a continuity of the soul of art, not its flesh; beginnings, but never endings. Against this eternal search for the ideal, Valdezco and Jarque maintain the rigid discipline of child-like exploration, experimentation, reinvention, and constant motion towards the next inception.

Both Valdezco and Jarque are recipients of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ prestigious Thirteen Artists Award. Riding in Circle opens on 04 December 2010 and will run until 30 December at Blanc Manila Peninsula, G/F Peninsula Hotel, Makati City. Gallery hours are from __ pm – __ pm, Mondays thru Saturdays. For further enquiries, please call telephone numbers 752 0032 or 0920 927 6436.

AFTER MALL HOURS

Transitions, realizations and choosing directions… themes translated using acrylic, pastel and archival ink on paper and canvas.  Through the images of conflicts of man, the irregularities of life represented by floating geometrical shapes and deconstructed images of photographs of landscapes, abandoned houses and other spaces in Japan as a product of reflections of 30 years of existence. There are dialogues and conversations within the frames of artwork, showing conflicting views and feelings of the subjects and the influences of people through a man’s life stages. 

Uncover the body languages, the hidden places and the essence of people behind the bits and pieces of puzzles in these artworks as multi-media artist J.Pacena II presents his recent works with an exhibition entitled After Mall Hours at BLANC Peninsula Manila.  

Born on July 16, 1980 in Quezon City,  J. Pacena II  finished his Elementary in 1993 at Kamuning Elementary School and his High School  in 1997 at the University of Santo Tomas Pay High School. He graduated in 2001 at the University of Santo Tomas College of Fine Arts and Design with a major in Advertising Arts.   In 2003, he became an instructor for College of Fine Arts and Design in the same University and pursued his Graduate Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Fine Arts.  On that same year, he directed his first Music Video under BMG Pilipinas (now Sony Music Entertainment Philippines, Inc.). He presented his first solo art exhibition in 2005 and had his first curatorial project for the exhibition entitled “boxed” in 2006. In 2007, he became a core member of Tutok, a group of artists advocating in human rights and education conditions in the Philippines. In 2008 he joined the faculty roster of Asia Pacific College, School of Multimedia Arts in Magallanes. In September that year, he married his long time partner whom he became friends with since 1990.  

This year, he recently came home from a 3-month residency grant by Japan Foundation and UP Vargas Museum under the Jenesys Programme for Creators 2010.  During his stay in Japan, he was able to make a tremendous amount of time reflecting about his life, about his career and his future plans as an artist and as an individual.  After Mall Hours is a pause to activity, a product of reflection, a personal observation of the transitional period in one’s life. 
The exhibit opens on November 5, 2010 at 6PM and will run until November 26, 2010 at the BLANC Peninsula Manila, G/F shops  9 & 10 Ayala Avenue, cor.Makati Avenue, Makati City.For more information about this exhibition, visit www.blanc.ph or contact +639209276436 or send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  Free admission, the gallery is open everday.

Nearest and Dearest

Beautiful apparitions

“Death is before me today:
like the recovery of a sick man,
like going forth into a garden after sickness.”

The specter of death loiters on the edges of Raffy T. Napay’s first solo exhibition, Nearest and Dearest. In 19 textured paintings, he tells the open-ended story of his afflicted mother with paint, sawdust, and burlap. The earthen palette he uses — reds, browns, and yellows — is the color of soil, skin, and sickness.

His images recede into the background, visible only as beautiful apparitions haunting his canvases. His work achieves clarity with distance just as painful memories are better understood with time. Nearest and Dearest is an intimate remembrance of things past and sustenance of a cherished hope.

“Death is before me today:
like the odor of myrrh,
like sitting under a sail in a good wind.”

Countless hospital visits are subsumed into In Bed, a single image of repose. Head propped on a pillow, hands resting over belly, a lone figure awaits fate. This is how Napay recalls seeing his mother during those dark days: a frail woman almost swallowed by drab misery.

To achieve the dark, gritty atmosphere of this piece, Napay experiments with layers of oil, acrylic, leaves, grass, and broom fibers.

In Reflection, Napay’s mother literally confronts her mortality and contemplates her skeleton through a mirror.

His materials very nearly overwhelm his subjects up close but standing a respectful distance from his paintings reveal the delicate ghosts living in his impasto artworks.

Beds and empty chairs become a symbol for his mother’s incapacity. The bed Napay sets on fire in The Dreadful Hours is seen again in Two Double Decks, devoid of occupants. The sewing machine she sits at in Thread of Fate is a barely recognizable ghost in The Gift. Chair of All Trades, the site of many family gatherings, is found underneath a tree accompanied only by echoes of conversations past in The Chair.

“Death is before me today:
like the course of a stream;
like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.”

Sickness is a trial not only for the afflicted. The miasma of disease spreads among the healthy and settles in their bones. The fight for hope is hard-won.

The surfaces Napay paints on are frayed, torn, rough around the edges — just as he must have been while grappling with the possibility of loss.

Faith and love remain indomitable, however, as evidenced in vignettes like Waiting and Through Illness, and his metaphorical turns in Love’s Eternal Shade, and Connect.

“Death is before me today:
like the home that a man longs to see,
after years spent as a captive.”*

Nearest and Dearest is a catharsis, a beautiful and sensitive depiction of an emotionally draining period in the artist’s life. To see his mother’s life ebbing away, her vitality doused by illness was a trying time. Now that the crisis is past and his mother is convalescing, Napay can afford to look back and appreciate how her brush with death made familial bonds stronger.

Future aspirations, which were put on hold, can still materialize. His faded Dream House, seen only from the outside, still has a chance to become reality. Hope springs eternal.

In My Mother, all demons appear to have been exorcized. Though created with the same materials and the same technique, it possesses an optimistic light-heartedness absent in the other works. The clouds have parted to reveal a sky tinged with pale blue, his mother’s jaundiced complexion has given way to a rosy hue, even her dress is in the pink of health. The circular rags referenced in Thread of Fate are resurrected as flowers in full bloom.

Death was before them today. But it is no longer today, it is tomorrow. — ll

*translation of a segment from the Pyramid Texts, ca. 2000 BC

GAMES FOR GROWING

It is a challenge to keep growing as artists, individuals, partners and especially as parents.  The exhibition is in part about that. It is about our (Nano, Min and Haraya’s) relationship with each other as individuals and as a unit. The exhibition though is mostly about play or at least trying to capture the essence of it in our work, the spontaneity and fun that comes so easily in the works of our child and which for us is an elusive thing that we try to capture. The exhibit might also be a metaphor for the futility of that…

Haraya’s works are six line metal sculptures we fabricated based on his drawings that we have collected. These are his own pantheon of gods from his interest in Greek mythology crossed over with the robots (and Iron Man) that he is also interested in. 

We have also enlarged six of his drawings of masks and put them in wood. Nano burned the line marks from Haraya’s work and we then stained them in with acrylic.

I have made 20 collages based on Walt Disney’s Pinnochio children’s book.   It is a way of trying to understand my relationship with my son though I am definitely no Geppetto, perhaps we are both (Haraya and I) Pinocchios in these collages.

Nano has made metal paintings with images from space from the word Ape. Trying to evolve as parents we feel as we are lost in space (ha ha ha) . Nano also had an extreme interest in sci-fi movies and books when he was growing up and he remembers this with a certain fondness.

The two of us (Nano and I) collaborated on several paintings which is quite challenging as we both have different styles and mediums as well as interests as artists.  In these works we chose images from our childhood and our interest in childhood things. We were also interested in the collaborative works of American artists from the 80’s (our childhood) and we wanted to do something in that vein. In that way we created diptychs and triptychs in oil, acrylic and enamel. The process in creating the work was as important as the images embedded in the work.

 This exhibition looks back at our childhood but also moves forward as we try new things and get out of our comfort zone. In this way not only our son but we as well are included in the game of growing.  

  - Yasmin Sison

 Games for Growing will open on Saturday 6pm September 4, 2010 at Blanc Peninsula Manila. For more information please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call/sms +63920-9276436.

 The exhibition will run until September 25, 2010.

Ronald Caringal

“Puff the Magic Jargon”

In “Puff the Magic Jargon,” his sixth solo show to date, Ronald Caringal takes apart the simplistic, if sometimes illusory, perspectives of life as taught in children’s literature, and reconstructs them into visual narratives that represent a less idealistic, less black-and-white view of the world. Using of some of the more canonical images and storylines from both classic fables and contemporary writing—The Hare and the Tortoise, Curious George, Where The Wild Things Are, and The Cat in the Hat, to name a few—the artist, in his characteristic visual style, presents very tongue-in-cheek humor and largely overt depictions of a more grown-up, more “realistic” world view.

Most interestingly, however, while Caringal at once tears down the child-like ideals that these stories have drawn up, he, in doing, also nevertheless pleads for a return to this very innocence. In showcasing here the ugly complexities of the “real world,” he also insists that the purity of the alternative be preserved—that the impossible luxury of these precious images and simplicities, and the sacredness of these paradoxical truths, be the final reprieve that we, as modern human beings, can ultimately return to.

Puff the Magic Jargon will open on Saturday, July 3 from 5pm to 8PM at blanc Peninsula Manila. Blanc PMN is located at The Peninsula Manila G/F Shops 9 and 10 Ayala Avenue corner Makati Avenue, Makati City.

The exhibition will run until July 24, 2010.

For more information please visit www.blanc.ph or call/sms +63920.9276436

Break in Continuity

In her second solo show, Kadin Tiu translates the private process and inevitable struggle between the transient ideas and identities that are typical of the artist’s life. Depicting this haunting, terribly lonely and at times consuming moment of contemplation, doubt, reassessment, and eventual self-realization, she builds on literal images of isolation and interruption to capture this fragile, floating space in between certainties: when one must betray the suddenly archaic perspectives they have outgrown, while wrestling with the grain of something frightening unfamiliar and yet excitingly new and potentially epiphanic. 

In the magical reality of her pieces, there is an agitation and energy of thought and possibility streaming into reality in the form of a dark, symbiotic liquid, threatening to engulf and drown out all that is concrete and tangible. There is a necessary yet beautiful destruction that the artist embraces, which she anticipates will give her passage into a new, if ephemeral plane of artistic creation.

Break in Continuity will open on Friday, June 4 from 5pm to 8PM at blanc Peninsula Manila. Blanc PMN is located at The Peninsula Manila G/F Shops 9 and 10 Ayala Avenue corner Makati Avenue, Makati City.

The exhibition will run until June 26, 2010.

For more information please visit www.blanc.ph call/sms +63920.9276436