Author: admin
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Two Lives (Vikram Seth, 2005)
In 1969, Vikram Seth moved from India to London to study. He finds accommodation with his uncle Shanti and his German wife Henny, a Jewish woman. Both got to know each other during Shanti’s studies in Berlin in the 1930s. The relationship of his Uncle and Aunt, which was at first rather distant, gradually deviates…
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Affections (Rodrigo Hasbun, 2015)
There is more to what is being said in Rodrigo Hasbun’s novel that reviews the convulsion of Latin America In Rodrigo Hasbun’s (Cochabamba, Bolivia 1981) The Affections, it is convenient to emphasize, from the outset, the extreme conciseness of a prose that suggests more of what is being accounted. What is said and what remains…
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The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015)
The 2017 Literature Nobel Prize is awarded to the writer Kazuo Ishiguro. He was born in Japan in 1954 and moved to England at the age of five with his parents. I previously reviewed his work “The Buried Giant” on this blog. An article on the occasion of his winning the prize will follow.
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Laura Owens at the Whitney Museum
There are manifold levels in the work of the American artist Laura Owens. For more than twenty years, the 47-year-old has been experimenting with the genre of painting, always with a claim to explore what is visually and creatively possible, to transcend the boundaries of the known, both in form and in content. Laura Owens…
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Manton de Manila
The mantón de Manila became one of the most recognizable textiles in nineteenth-century Spain, and Juan Luna’s Mujer con mantón de Manila (c. 1880s) offers a precise record of its material qualities and its use in urban fashion. The painting shows a woman standing outdoors, wrapped in a large silk embroidered shawl. Its cream ground,…
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Propaganda at Lopez
On Trauma, Postmemory, and Modernity in Propaganda at the Lopez Museum The first half of 2015 in the Manila art scene has been marked by an endless parade of the second-rate, the trying-hard, and the copycat. Attend any art fair or gallery opening and you are confronted by the fact that, despite the sheer volume…
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The calm on this side of the border belies the scene on the other side
In “The calm on this Side of the Border Belies the Scene on the Other Side,” brothers Jason and Joseph Tecson exhibit sculptures and oil paintings which mark a highlight in their individual careers. The paintings were started during Joseph’s stint as a resident artist at Whitespace Blackbox in Neuchatel, Switzerland while the sculptures are part of…
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Jason Tecson/ Eroded Myths
This article I wrote in anticipation of Jason Tecson’s two man show with Syrian artist Thaer Maarouf at Sana Gallery – Singapore. The sculptures of Jason Tecson speaks about reality in the same way nightmares do: through concrete manifestation of symbols found in them. His works are not images but fabrications, which in an analogous…
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Jigger Cruz Superstar
Jigger Cruz is among the country’s 30-something superstars but can he live up to the hype? Jigger Cruz, the latest darling of Philippine painting, owes his success to several factors. Foremost is his ability to carve a distinctive middle ground in contemporary painting, balancing conservative and avant-garde ambitions. His works, while appearing untamed and fresh,…
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The Shift of Desires
Review of ‘It’s about the end that keeps on coming’ by Jay Ticar at West Gallery It’s a distressing and shattered world, if you read into the paintings of Jay Ticar, but one that is not without hope or room for contemplation. In his paintings and drawings the Manila-born, Toronto-based artist unravels a surreal world of…
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Agnes Arellano eating a pizza
Agnes Arellano’s Flying Dakini at MO_Space Tonight was the opening of Agnes Arellano’s Flying Dakini at Mo_Space in the Fort. One of my favorite spaces for the reason that when I used to go there, you can get a doughnut downstairs at Krispy Kreme, sometimes for free. I had such fond memories of MO_Space, not…
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Don Dalmacio and the manual of painting
Review of Don Dalmacio’s Condensed and Evaporated at BLANC I vividly remember going to the Cultural Center of the Philippines in July 2009 to see the works of the latest 13 Artists Awardees at that time. By now I have forgotten most of the works in that show but the paintings of Don Dalmacio are…
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Max Balatbat a.k.a. MaxBal and his Action Star Paintings
Artists represented by Silverlens are some of the most successful names in Philippine art today. By virtue perhaps of good business practices or critical choices made by its proprietors or the fact that the gallery takes hold of their artists like no mama bear can. In spite of this, I never gave anyone who…
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Paintings that look at you
A Blank Stare Dear Abstract Yason Banal Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines- Diliman His works are preoccupied with lives of outsiders nurtured and broken apart by interaction with the rest of the world giving them the touch of a perceptive wanderer. I have followed his works since I was in college where Banal also…
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Chocolate Ruins by Rodel Tapaya in ARNDT BERLIN
Rodel Tapaya’s main piece at ARNDT’s primary location in Berlin resists blatant interpretation. In his expansive painting, The Chocolate Ruins, the blend of thematically related images impresses a conflated disquiet and a sense of simultaneous ironies. Speaking in the reconstructed and often esoteric language of folklore¬ – myths and legends and their transfer in barbershop…
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Young contemporary artists as ‘Dirty, Poorly Dressed, and Filled with Love’
By: Camille Anne M. Arcilla – @inquirerdotnetPhilippine Daily Inquirer / 02:06 AM September 30, 2013 “Dirty, poorly dressed and filled with love” could be the exact description of Filipino artists—the reason why a group of young ones had to put it in visuals. “‘Dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love’ is a somewhat stereotypical description…
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The Beard Factor
About Habilin’s hairy thrills Aside from some minor disparities, Carlo Alvarez’s and Val MacArthy Depro’s story is kind of like Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video. There are three reasons why I recall the scenes in Thriller and the now declining genre of the music television in watching Habilin. One, is the shortness of it. It…
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Sexless Pinoy Cinema
The decline of sex in the genre of indie and short-time Four years ago in my scriptwriting class, one classmate turned in a movie script for a pornographic movie. No, I don’t have a copy of it. But from what I remember the script was all ninety minutes of grunts and grinding that would otherwise…
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Kung Mangarap ka’t magising revisited
Thirty five years after the movie was made Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising (Moments in a Stolen Dream). 1977. Philippines. Directed by Mike De Leon. Screenplay by De Leon, Rey Santayana. With Christopher de Leon, Hilda Koronel, Laurice Guillen. DCP. Courtesy ABS-CBN Sagip Pelikula. In Filipino; English subtitles. 112 min. Photo: MOMA/Cesar Hernando Revisiting Mike De…
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Jed Escueta: Valid Until Life
Valid Until Life Gallery 2, Light and Space Contemporary 53 Fairlane St., West Fairview, Quezon City, PH June 29 – 30 July 2013 Valid Until Life gathers the work of Jed Escueta who explores strategies of representation and narration in his photographs. Since starting out as a photographer, Escueta has used the camera to call…
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Joseph Tecson: Destroy the Cages at West Gallery
When Joseph Tecson first painted in prison, he was doubtful he would make something good out of it. He painted initially at the insistence of his brother and because there was an urge to pass time productively. That was the simple reason. Each week, throughout the four years and twenty days he was incarcerated for…
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Indonesia at the Venice Biennale 2013
Indonesia has moved its pavilion into the Arsenale for the first time. On an impressive 500 square meters, the works of six artists are presented here. The participants were selected in a lengthy selection process – after all, they had set themselves the goal of showing a representative cross-section of the variegated contemporary Indonesian art…
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Jigger Cruz / Depth Circus
Jigger Cruz / Depth Circus Jigger Cruz explores the primitive memory of the figurative in contemporary painting. He is returning to modernism’s layers of subdued, scarcely fashioned hasty urges to tear down the tenets of precedent movements. When such an attempt is filtered through an ironic, neo-expressionist approach, it’s even more difficult for the…
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Julius Clar, Not here anymore at Light and Space Contemporary
In bringing collage and assemblage works that recall the twentieth century master, Joseph Cornell, Julius Clar confronts us with two distinct traditions, one rooted in the whimsical visions of Western Modernism and the other in the more politically charged spheres of the Filipino avant-garde aspirations of the 1960s that equally inform his practice. Clar’s world,…
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Jason Tecson, Terror Decor at West Gallery
Against the unwieldy physical stature associated with monumental sculptures, Tecson’s creatures appear almost farcically feeble, void of the ostentatious tradition of his artistic precedents and behave more like loaded figurines. He effectively and a bit roguishly, undermines the canons of sculpture. The superficially solid body is overstated but becomes a flimsy vessel for unworldly appearances.…
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Light and Space boys
We are now installing beds in every studio in light and space. Not mainly for the convenience of sleeping inside the studio but rather to make the artists work on their projects as soon as they get up and until the very last hour. So they would have plenty of time to dream of exhibitions…
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Redd Nacpil: Tolerant Animal
I admire his works. Incidentally he is also a close friend, my ka-batch in high school, and former college fraternity brother. In my opinion, he has included in this exhibit some of his most honest if not the best pieces in his young career. From all the years of knowing him, I’ve always felt that…
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Jerry Araos, sculptor, 68
Artist Jerusalino “Jerry” V. Araos passed away on December 23. He was 68. I learned from my news feed that Jerry Araos passed away today. He is not a friend or a person close to me but I have one vivid memory of him: I was in college and I was organizing a tree planting…
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Rodel Tapaya: Deities
The depictions of these native gods resurface in Rodel Tapaya’s work from oral traditions around ancient beliefs in the Philippine religion, a religion that believes that gods existed in many forms and that there is an invisible realm within our world. Contained in the format of a portrait, they are rendered as abstracted combinations of…
Geronimo Cristobal 