The Textures of Solitude by fostgallery

THE TEXTURES OF SOLITUDE 24.09.2022 19.11.2022

In Collaboration with

THE TEXTURES OF SOLITUDE

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

“I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like

Louis Ho

a scene of wet lawn and stormbeat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away

a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement. Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day … Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near wildly before a long and lamentable blast.” 1

Jane Eyre opens with its eponymous heroine retreating into the shelter of a curtained alcove. Her little nook looks out onto the English landscape stretching away beyond its circumscribed, cloistered confines, proffering a view of inclement winter weather, as far as the eye can see, on the other side of the window. The secluded window-seat is wedged between domestic interiority within and the wildness of the elements without, a liminal zone caught between claustrophobia and agoraphobia. The paradox of an enclosed space that, conversely, affords a panorama of the world beyond certainly speaks to the enforced solitude that characterized the experience of the pandemic for many, reduced to enduring life within the immurement of four walls.

Notes 1 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn, 3rd Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 5 – 6. 2 After all, as Gaston Bachelard remarks of corner spaces: “The corner is a sort of halfbox, part walls, part door. It will serve as an illustration for the dialectics of inside and outside …” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 137.

The trope of the window, as an aperture that mediates between the polarities of interior and exterior, informs Nicole Coson’s massive canvases – a shuttered window, that is.2 Take Exoskeleton 2 (2022), for instance: measuring almost four metres across and two metres high, the piece is a minimalist, monochromatic painting featuring panels of black horizontal lines. The standardized, single-minded regularity of its patterning, which recalls, for one, the pseudo-mechanical geometry of Frank Stella’s black paintings, is broken up by a disarray here; a stray line there; an isolated patch of blank space bordering the bottom edge of the composition. These irregularities are explained by the fact that the work, a monotype, was produced through the use of Venetian blinds. 4

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

Above Nicole Coson, Exoskeleton 1, 2022 Artwork detail

Louis Ho

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

Oil-based paint was applied to the slats of the blinds and, with the aid

of three-dimensional space may be rendered illusionistically. As art

of a hand-operated press – christened “Big Bertha”, for the German

historian Erwin Panofsky pointed out, the idea of the window negated

army’s famous canon in the First World War – the image was imprinted

the physical presence of the medium itself, which disappears beneath

onto canvas, resulting in the finished pictorial product. Coson refers to

the replication of reality promised by perspectivalism. “The surface is

these works as paintings. The typically one-off character of monotype

now no longer the wall or the panel bearing the forms of individual things

impressions sidesteps the material reproducibility of the print, suggesting

and figures”, he wrote, “but rather is once again that transparent plane

instead the unique ontology of the painterly gesture. A single set of

through which we are meant to believe that we are looking into a space

blinds would be run through the press as it progressively deteriorated,

...”5 If the painted canvas is no longer a material support but a transparent

a process that yields twenty to thirty images on average. Here, then,

veil through which the world is perceived, then Coson’s occlusion of that

the disruptions to the equilibrium of the pattern are temporally unique, a

optical channel, the literal pulling down of the blinds over the window,

transcription of a particular moment in the breaking down of the blinds,

is not just a thwarting of the gaze, but a statement on the psychology

the material “buckling, bending and breaking under the pressure caused

behind the act of representation itself – a view turned inside, not outside.

by the upwards and downwards force of the press.”3 The artist notes of the seriality of these individualized renditions that “Typically, I use one

Not unlike Jane’s window seat, the pictorial motif of blinds evokes, in

set [of blinds] for an entire show … this way, the viewer sees the same

the artist’s visual universe, an interstitial space. A set of blinds, she

window in different stages of degradation, it becomes sequential.”

remarks, is “an everyday object that acts as a porous barrier between

Louis Ho

Above Nicole Coson, Exoskeleton 1, 2022 Artist’s Studio

the inside and outside worlds we occupy, a device which we can open,

Notes 3 In an e-mail to the author, dated August 5, 2022. All quotes from Coson included in this essay refer here. 4 Leon Battista Alberti, Leon Battista Alberti: On painting; a new translation and critical edition, trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 39. 5

An image like Exoskeleton 2 punctures the surface and solidity of the

close but also view from both sides.” The shuttering of the metaphorical

wall it is hung on, approximating the appearance of a window. It is worth

window that is the picture plane, jettisoning the act of recreating the

remembering that Leon Battista Alberti, in his influential Renaissance-

world through paint and brush, re-orients the gaze from physical terrain

era treatise, On Painting, or De Pictura, described the basic method of

to psychic landscapes. The threshold between interior and exterior is

painting as beginning with the construction of an “open window”, which

embodied in Coson’s simultaneous proffering and withdrawal of sight,

allows for the observation of the vista beyond: “First I trace as large a

gesturing at the oscillation between revelation and concealment in her

quadrangle as I wish, with right angles, on the surface to be painted; in

work. She writes that “there is something very seductive to me about the

this place, it [the rectangular quadrangle] certainly functions for me as

interlaced view of the push and pull between beholding and withholding

an open window through which the historia is observed …”4 Pivoting on

… with which one can choose and calibrate how to reveal oneself and

Alberti’s notional window, of course, is the system of linear perspective,

negotiate the terms of one’s visibility.”

the means par excellence by which the two-dimensional representation

Notes 5 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 55. 6

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

Louis Ho

The calibration, as she puts it, of exposure and hiddeness speaks to the liminality of the works, objects that hover between print and painting, neither one nor the other. The transmedial character of her canvases, in other words, bearing the material traces of the serialised print yet suggesting the ontological individuality of the unique painting, dovetails with the dichotomy between openness and closure that marks their thematic concerns. “In my practice”, she observes, “I wish to operate from a place of in-betweens, from an inter/outer space between visibility and invisibility … a state of statelessness caused by two forces at odds and something born from that tension.” If Coson’s images are both print and painting, Bernie Pacquing’s contributions to the present exhibition, produced in response to her work, are paintings the materiality and visuality of which were intended as reference to the methods of print-making. Black Matter on Red (2022) is a monumental diptych. Peeking through the ox-blood red of the work are numerous layers of paint, as many as twelve or more, with the chief hue of these undercoats being a shade of black that was produced from mixing a broad variety of other colours, including blue, green, dark brown, amber, ochre and crimson. The resulting painting is a tactile, predominantly monochromatic canvas, flecked throughout with dried drips of paint, and embedded in its thick, viscid textures are random flotsam and jetsam left over from the protracted process of painting, such as stray hairs. Streaking across sections of the panels are conspicuous, dark-coloured bands of impasto, which boast surprisingly well-defined edges. In the manner of the stenciling technique of silkscreen printing, the latter were created through the use of negative space. Lines of masking tape were laid out on the surface of the canvas, and applications

Left Nicole Coson Exoskeleton 2, 2022 Artwork detail 8

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

Louis Ho

of black paint smeared over; after the tape was removed, only glutinous encrustations remained. As the artist relates it, he also subsequently transferred stray flecks of paint from the tape and reapplied it to the canvas.6 The epic scale of Black Matter mirrors, of course, the expansive dimensions of Exoskeleton 2, as are the former’s linear elements a direct response to the schema of regularised lines in the latter. More to the point, however, Pacquing’s utilisation of the stenciling method reiterates the tension between absence and presence that underlies Coson’s images. The additive spirit of painting, wherein an image is constructed from the build-up of brushstrokes, is belied here by the (makeshift) stencil’s subtractive nature, oriented as it is around a spatial lacuna. The antinomies of occlusion and inclusion, in fact, undergirding the painting’s citation of serigraphic means, do not simply indicate an intertextually responsive visual language, but are intimately bound up with the artist’s Notes 6 As shared with the author in an oral interview, conducted in Singapore in August, 2022. All quotations from Pacquing, unless otherwise stated, refer here. 9

memories of his years as a student in art school, a testament to the dialectics of present absence that encapsulates the ephemerality of memory. The artist writes at length of his time at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, where he was trained in screen printing:

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

Louis Ho

“Uni years were quite an experience. Being from the Visual Communication side of Fine Arts, its required a different kind of discipline. I would do oversized silk screens … Preparation was a process for me … The design was just secondary. It’s the whole idea and process of transferring an image to a canvas or any surface that was fulfilling. Then we finished off with some overlays of paint that’s where my painting sensibility comes in. Sometimes I print again on top of overlays of paint. So it is print, paint then print again. … Print making at that time was an exercise for me where I had a chance to experiment with my art.” 7

Left Bernardo Pacquing Black Matter on Red, 2022 Artwork detail

Notes 7 In a text message to the author, dated August 24, 2022. 12

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

Above Bernardo Pacquing Strata of Thought 04, 2022 FOST Gallery, Singapore 13

Louis Ho

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

As the anecdote demonstrates, the mediums of painting and printing

For much of the pandemic, Pacquing found himself trapped in Singapore,

were imbricated in his practice from its earliest days, when he painted on

where he had been visiting his family – the victim of border closures

print, and printed on paint, one form of imaging enfolded into the other in

during a period of global anxiety and paranoia. It was a trying period

a feedback loop. He remarks that, then, “the screen was the artwork itself

for him, having lost access to his studio and tools in Manila, where

for me.” His other works in the exhibition, indeed, even more directly than

he is otherwise based. Being obliged to operate in a small apartment

Black Matter, reference Pacquing’s history with printing, reimagining the

drastically reduced his options for the sort of work that was possible.

tools of screen and squeegee as compositional elements. The paintings

04, for instance, which was executed during his time in Singapore,

in the Strata of Thought series, 01 to 04 (all 2022), not only assume

remains unpainted on the sides of its canvas, the result of the simple,

the rectangular format of the serigraphic screen, but have incorporated

practical fact that he could not afford to dirty or stain the area outside

rollers, which function as squeegees, into their final appearance. These

of the canvas, while he worked in the living room of his apartment.

rollers were used, in place of brushes, to impress paint onto the surface

By contrast, the bitumen used in 02 had to be boiled with thinner to

of the canvas. Strata 04, for one, features manifold layers, with eight or

reduce its viscosity, and such a procedure could only be carried out in

nine coats, all in various shades of red, poured onto the canvas and then

the capaciousness of his Manila studio. Being back on home turf, once

rolled over its surface with a cardboard tube of the sort that canvases

cross-border travel was possible again, also allowed Pacquing to pick up

are packed and shipped in. The tube was, finally, attached to the painting

on the woodworking dimension of his practice; the wooden stretchers

as a processual relic, a sculptural inflection that, as part of a wall-

utilised in 01 and 03 were produced, by hand, in the Philippines.8 The

bound piece, recalls the multimedial collages of Robert Rauschenberg’s

use of ox-blood red in Black Matter refers, in fact, to the general mood

Combines. Strata 02 is covered in black and grey elastomeric paint

of emotional perturbance that marked his experience of waiting out the

(generally used on exterior surfaces of structures), as well as a layer of

pandemic in Singapore. He showed a number of red canvases in a solo

bitumen, and a final coat of resin. The squeegee, in this case, is a tightly

presentation earlier this year, and noted of his chromatic choice at this

rolled piece of canvas. Like 02, 01 and 03 were created using lengths of

stage: “And the rage went on… I tried to compose myself. I continued with

canvas wound into a roller, and, in the case of the latter, also includes

my red works … Signs of agony and frustrations are vividly visible in my

layers of emulsion paint mixed with cement, the brittle, cracked surface

work. Red became darker, deeper into crimson, cadmium-deep red mixed

of the pigment serving as evidence of the fact.

with black. It was a bloody dark red all over my work.”9

Louis Ho

Above Bernardo Pacquing Strata of Thought 04, 2022 Artwork detail

Notes 8 Pacquing has executed monumental, public structures in wood, inspired by the engineering of domes and mounds. Both projects are located in his native Philippines; the first, Earth Mounds (2018), stands on a small island, Kopiat, in the Davao Gulf, while the more recent Domes Village (2019) is situated in the New Clark City River Zone in Capas, Tarlac. 9 The exhibition, Disquietude, was held at Silverlens in Manila from January to February, 2022. See the section, “Artist’s note”, on the gallery’s website at <https:// www.silverlensgalleries.com/exhibitions/2022-01-14/ disquietude>. Last accessed August 30, 2022. 14

Of windows and screens, and, of course, the pandemic

Louis Ho

The turmoil represented by Pacquing’s bloody, dark red perhaps finds yet another point of correspondence with the lingering air of silence, and solitude, in Coson’s images of blinds, which were likewise produced during the pandemic (while the artist was at art school in London). She notes that “there is a sense of claustrophobia in the works which I think was partly adopted due to quarantine and perhaps a sense of longing from living in a period of prolonged withoutness”, a withoutness that is reflected in the disquietude of her fellow artist’s paintings. To do without, to be trapped in the claustrophobia of a foreign clime, to be caught in the tension between visibility and invisibility, absence and presence – as much as the paintings of Coson and Pacquing embody the nuances of transmedial praxis, foregrounding the motifs of window and screen, they speak just as eloquently and viscerally to the loss, privation, and emptiness of our current, contagion-ridden moment in the twenty-first century. 15

Right Nicole Coson Exoskeleton 1, 2022 Artwork detail

About the writer Louis Ho

Louis Ho is a curator, critic and art historian based in Singapore. His research is concerned with the contemporary visual cultures of Southeast Asia, ranging from art to the moving image, with a particular focus on the specific sociocultural contexts in which various visual vernaculars have emerged in this part of the world, especially the vocabularies of queerness. As an independent practitioner, he is interested in hybrid curatorial concepts; he has put together exhibitions such as only losers left alive (love songs for the end of the world),

The Foot Beneath the Flower: Camp. Kitsch. Art. Southeast Asia, and It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, you would cry too if it happened to you. He was formerly a curator at the Singapore Art Museum, and co-curator of the Singapore Biennale in 2016. He has been published in various journals, including Modern

Chinese Literature and Culture, and is a regular contributor to publications such as ArtAsiaPacific. He has taught at various Singapore institutions, including the National Institute of Education. 17

Works by

NICOLE COSON Nicole Coson Exoskeleton 1 and 2 2022 Artist’s studio

Artist Profile Nicole Coson

Nicole COSON (b. 1992, Manila, lives and works in the UK) aims to examine the concept of invisibility, not only as a passive position as a result of erasure, the problematic dichotomisation of culture but also its potential as an effective artistic strategy. Can invisibility be seen not just as a disability but as an advantage or ability? Like the optical survival strategies utilised by both prey and predator in the natural world? Who can benefit from this tactic of concealment and dissimulation and how can one apply these strategies? In her work, Coson explores the economies of visibility and disappearance in the case of overlooked bodies, invisibility in warfare as tactical counter measures, and cultural visibility in art. Coson’s work searches for a productive position within invisibility that lends us an opportunity in which we are able to negotiate the terms of our visibility. Right Nicole Coson London, 2022 Image Courtesy of the Artist 23

To vanish and reappear as we please and as necessary to our own personal and artistic objectives, to effectively disappear amongst the grass blades until the very moment we must break that illusion, the very moment when it is time to strike. 24

Nicole Coson

Exoskeleton 1 2022 Oil on canvas H195 x W385 cm

Nicole Coson

Exoskeleton 2 2022 Oil on canvas H195 x W385 cm

Nicole Coson

Exoskeleton 3 2022 Oil on canvas H200 x W135 cm

Bernardo Pacquing Strata of Thought 01 2022 Artwork detail

Artist Profile Bernardo Pacquing

Bernardo PACQUING (b. 1967, Tarlac, Philippines) continues to approach the expressive potential of abstraction in painting and sculpture through the use of disparate found objects that confront and disrupt perceptions of aesthetic representation, form, and value. By focusing on the organic shapes of visual reality, his work displaces notions of indisputable forms and opens possibilities for coexisting affirmations and denials. Pacquing was born in Tarlac, Pampanga in 1967. He graduated from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 1989 and was twice awarded the Grand Prize for the Art Association of the Philippines Open

Art Competition (Painting, Non-Representation) in 1992 and 1999. He is also a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists

Award in 2000, an award given to exemplary artists in the field of Left Bernardo Pacquing Singapore, 2022 Image Courtesy of the Artist 33

contemporary visual art. Pacquing received a Freeman Fellowship Grant for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States. He lives and works in Parañaque City. 34

Bernardo Pacquing

Strata of Thought 01

Strata of Thought 02

2022

Mixed media on canvas

H152.4 x W120 x D8.5 cm

H152.7 x W130 x D9.5 cm

Bernardo Pacquing

Strata of Thought 03

Strata of Thought 04

2022

Mixed media on canvas

H152.9 x W136 x D9.5 cm

H152.4 x W122 x D9 cm

Bernardo Pacquing

Black Matter on Red 2022 Oil on canvas H183 x W305 cm (diptych)

THE TEXTURES OF SOLITUDE 24 September - 19 November 2022 FOST Gallery, Singapore

Published by FOST Private Limited ISBN: 978-981-18-5764-5 Front Cover: (L) Bernardo Pacquing, Strata of Thought 02, 2022, Artwork detail (R) Nicole Coson, Exoskeleton 2, 2022, Artwork detail

This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticisim or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. 42