Flaunting the Imperfections
Of late the bustling art scene in the metropolis has become unusually obsessed with painting masters of bygone art movements. You know the drift--that pretty faces with flowers or the endless portrayal of skulls--as if mementos mori are not enough. Dominated by a younger set of urban artists, unearthing visual styles from the dustbin of oblivion, some paintings even dwell deeper and extend further flourishing with European aesthetics and history--how the church and the state settled their differences--are brought to the fore prompting general viewers to brush up on western art history in keeping abreast with these changing artistic times. The iconographies of these nature tend to convolute our already overloaded and stressed out art senses.
As this creative status remains underway, Malformed, a group exhibit by both by mid-career and new conscious practitioners, who have been unfazed with these recent trends. Curated by Janos Delacruz and Pepe Mendoza, they draw positively inward, becoming more personal than social as their respective visual languages progressed. They often eschew the grand and the historical, their basic preoccupation are in churning out what constitute artistic freedom and current post pandemic issues.
Malformed refers that the preference of artists in rendering the painterly imperfect in commanding their framed presence in the minds of these nine painters and sculptors making an etched marks at the onset of their chosen creative careers. Every worthwhile artist will always avoid the comfortable and the natural perfect expressions, Malformed can cause serious fervor gearing up to maximum intensity. exploring the integration of artists imagining in a similar context, applying different approaches and creative energies on canvas. Visually most artists are still in their experimental stage-- attempting rich and never-been-tried allegories yet materiality seems almost incidental be it acrylic on canvas, oil on wood or new metal for sculpture. While the term contemporary art is temporary specific to these recent painterly creations, it is also deliberately obscure and all-encompassing. What was forbidden and parochial has been confidently featured upfront for this exhibition.
The proximity of Angono opts for a difference in dialectics among outside art practitioners exhibiting there. Their visual styles constantly recreate the contemporary to the hilt--integrating diversity in painting including hyperrealism, conceptual graphic, illustration and abstraction. Recently there seems to be a sprouting of art galleries and spaces like mushrooms in Rizal province reflecting the deepening of the soul of its community yet Angono has kept its independence as a safe and conducive haven for free and critical thinkers.
In Malformed these artists are increasingly working in a diverse range of genre and defying standard categorization of their works. These experimentation and hybridization even blur boundaries and have matured to their own capability to imagine. Their sphere of expression has become a breeding battleground that viewers can relate or re-appropriate to having similar experiences and one’s felt incident. They are innate storytellers and in their connived narratives there are no fixed answers or preachy sermons but only stories well-told and truth well-painted. In the end, their style is their substance and their realism is based on how authentic and novel their expressions can be.
In Malformed, art has become a revenge against circumstances that persists in their everyday undertakings, be it intimate, peculiar or communal. It has become their natural creative response making something out of nothing, that you are no longer beaten black and blue by life’s constant beatings. Preferred in the personal, longing for identity and eliciting memory, Malformed is depicted as a brewing melting pot prodding artists to visualize from the surreal evocations of man’s folly to playful festivities of the sublime to the old hard truth of hand-to-mouth subsistence of struggling artists. Not to downgrade too are the ghoulish millennial antics and macabre gestations highlighted by constricting lines, bold brushstrokes and luminous hues and earth tones by artists only in their 20s.
Although mostly versed in figurative representation, Malformed’s realism has always constricted and countered the traditional genres for it to redefine itself into new actualities in its own right. Often rejecting the banal and sacred, it defies fixation with the tested norm. As these artists are former apprentices coming out on their own, they maybe hinted with copying established painters as frames of reference for commercial or aesthetic purposes yet practicing in the peripheries have taught them new and fresh perspectives they have conceptualized their own distinct and evocative expressions. Malformed is striking for its diversity and richness. It has no shared style or desired intentions yet a common thread persists that individually they are capable of imagination and commitment to the creative craft. Collectively they push the cause what and how progressive art scene is offering at present.
Malformed figuratively means disturbing the peace—nine artists step up the plate and offer some of the purest and relevance expressions emanating here. With the bareness of the physical and cultural landscape, the disparity in life can be from within. This is where Malformed intervenes as it deems to create that critical dialogue of what is it for those who wish to be part of the dialogue.
Malformed weaves all these artists’ concerns not merely as a conscious interlude of colors, illustrations and other media but as something that is originally perceived in their fragile/fertile imaginations. These manifestations confront validation as their own inherent artistic intents and permutations stressing the value of spontaneity, appropriation and relevance.
Establishing tension, solitude or equilibrium, their spatial yet lyrical pieces may be subtle or harsh yet both convey the sense of delight in the painters’ free reign of imagery and visual style. Depending how one would come to view the collective significance of these artists, their personal to randomly induced varied outputs are to be expected. Malformed presents a critical resistance between the discriminating taste of the commercial public combined with the lofty artistic ambitions of the young. Even as they are open to more raw approaches to art, they still value that art should be created for its social function and not lost in its own sake.
Text by Jay Bautista
For inquiries and info, contact us at
Giant Dwarf Art Space
015 Manila East Road Highway corner Doña Justa St., Brgy. San Roque, Angono, Rizal
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday: 10am-5pm
Saturday-Sunday: 10am-6pm
Mobile: 0926-7922913 / 0977-1400559
Email: giantdwarf.ph@gmail.com
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