No Talking Points — exhibition by seven artists from the Philippines

NO TALKING POINTS A GROUP EXHIBITION

BY SEVEN ARTISTS FROM THE PHILIPPINES

_

NO TALKING POINTS A GROUP EXHIBITION

BY SEVEN ARTISTS FROM THE PHILIPPINES

_ ISBN 978 - 981- 07-1509- 0 PAPERBACK

978 - 981- 07-1510 - 6 E-BOOK

Editor Theresia Irma Curator Nilo Ilarde Coordinator Juan Alcazaren Essay Ronald Achacoso Graphic Design Jeffrey Lim / Studio 25 Printer Unico Services Artworks & Images © 2012 Participating Artists All rights reserved. No part of this catalog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior consent from the artists and gallery.

LYLE BUENCAMINO (b. 1978) graduated from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts with Bachelor in Fine Arts majoring in Painting in 2005. His first solo exhibition A Bowtie for John Lyle (2006) received International Studio Residency Grant from Ateneo Art Awards (2007), which granted him an artist residency in a studio in La Trobe University in Bendigo, Australia. Buencamino’s works had been included in numerous group exhibitions since 2003, most notably Deleted Scenes at Lopez Museum Manila, in which he began his series of large scale paintings of vintage movie stills from Lopez Museum Foundation.

Lyle Buencamino lives and works in Manila, Philippines.

CRIS VILLANUEVA JR. (b. 1959) graduated with Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Philippine Christian University in 1983 prior to taking up Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, graduating in 1990. Since 2005 to now, he had mounted 11 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions in cities in the Philippines, also in Hong Kong and Singapore. He was the recipient of Juror’s Choice Award of Merit (2010), Juror’s Choice (2006), and Grand Prize (2005) from Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards. Cris Villanueva Jr. lives and works in Antipolo City, Rizal, Philippines.

ELAINE NAVAS (b. 1964) completed Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Ateneo de Manila University Philippines in 1985 prior to taking up her second degree from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Painting in 1991. Navas was the recipient of Honorable Mention (2004, 2002) from Philip Morris Singapore Art Awards, Honorable Mention (1995) from Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards, and Juror’s Choice (1995, 1994) from Art Association of the Philippines.

Elaine Navas lives and works in Singapore.

JUAN ALCAZAREN (b. 1960) graduated from University of the Philippines College of Architecture with Bachelor of Landscape Architecture in 1983, prior to taking up Foundation courses in Sculpture from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, graduating in 1985. To date, Juan Alcazaren has exhibited his works in numerous group shows and mounted his solo shows in various venues in Philippines, in Singapore and in Hong Kong. Alcazaren was the recipient of Juror’s Choice (1993) in Art Association of the Philippines’ Annual Competition (Sculpture Category). His video work entitled “Vexations” won Second Place (1996) in Gawad CCP from Cultural Center of the Philippines, and was exhibited in several international film and video festivals. He was also the recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award (2000) from Cultural Center of the Philippines. Juan Alcazaren lives and works in Pasig City, Philippines.

NO TALKING POINTS A GROUP EXHIBITION

BY SEVEN ARTISTS FROM THE PHILIPPINES BERNARDO PACQUING CRIS VILLANUEVA ELAINE NAVAS HUBERT SAN JUAN JUAN ALCAZAREN LYLE BUENCAMINO NILO ILARDE

_ RONALD ACHACOSO ESSAY

RONALD ACHACOSO (b. 1966) is an artist/ writer based in Manila, Philippines. He graduated with Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 1989, and has since been practicing alongside the artists in this exhibition. Ronald was the recipient of the AAP Leo Benesa Award for Art Criticism (1991 and 1992), and the Thirteen Artists Award (2000) from Cultural Center of the Philippines. top left to right; LYLE BUENCAMINO The 80s Called They Want Their Paintings Back oil on canvas / 152 x 183 cm / 2012 CRIS VILLANUEVA JR. Surrogates In A Reality That Forever Evolves oil on canvas / 152 x 183 cm / 2012 ELAINE NAVAS Bart’s Homework 4 oil on canvas / 183 x 183 cm / 2012

NO TALKING POINTS showcases the works of seven Filipino artists at the height of their careers and noted for their sheer pursuit of the pleasures of art and of painting.

The title invites the viewer to abandon any theoretical alignment or disposition, and to view the works and its installation on its own terms. NILO ILARDE, the show’s guest curator and exhibitor, assembles an exhibition that resists being dictated upon by theme or theory—a departure from the usual academic practice of advancing the theory before the works, thus to avoid being bogged down by heavy discourse. Ilarde goes by the practice of ‘art before theory’, whereby theory is an implicit component that we intuit from the works, rather than exact from. The exhibitors do not fail to recognize the futility of escaping this, but nonetheless they exercise a defiant stance by force of habit, as grit to hone the edges. Each artist in this exhibition works independently of the others, but there is an inherent cohesiveness that manifest in the selected works. Most of them have shown together in other venues—there is a familiarity with each others’ work, and an implicitly shared sensibility that allow the works to reinforce each other regardless of a unifying theme or the lack thereof.

LYLE BUENCAMINO’s recent series of paintings are derived from black and white vintage stills of Tagalog films from the iconic LVN studios that indeterminately molded the pop-cultural psyche of the masses from before the war, and with its influence rippling up to the present.

Painted in impasto on a quasi-cinematic 6x8 foot canvas, the painting exudes an aura of archival nostalgia. Being the youngest painter in the group, Buencamino is relatively detached from his subject matter and regards them with a certain exoticism. He seeks to reduce the images in visual terms, although to a generation just before him, these larger than life figures—some of which still appear in films (albeit as faded stars or world-weary visages of their previous selves)—still form a part of their pop-iconography. On one canvas is the dramatic scene of a man and woman staring at the phone with dread. Painted over this image is the cheeky text that reads, ‘The 80’s Called, They Want Their Paintings Back’—perhaps a wry, self deprecating commentary on the current state of the local art scene, as well as a begrudging nod to the impact of the prevailing trend of that era. The accompanying canvas features a once

popular comedy-romance couple hiding behind a painting, aptly titled Hiding Behind Painting. Thick yellow band-aidshaped brush strokes obscure the picture and functions like an infinity mirror; the pigment literally hides the image of a portrait of figures hiding behind a painting of a painting. Through manipulation of text and appropriate title, he creates tenuous recontextualized imagery—an altered fiction as a vicarious stand-in, a second hand longing for an invented past.

In a different but parallel vein, CRIS VILLANUEVA JR. has been rummaging through artifacts from his own personal past. Retrieving a trove of old drawings he made as a child—this has become his subject matter for an ongoing series of works—relics from another lifetime serves as a point of reference from which he draws insight into his own artistic development.

In this instance, the image is a cartoonish rendering of a cloud drawn with a blue felt pen on a notepad paper. Entitled Surrogates In A Reality That Forever Evolves, the painting depicts in detail the creased radial imprint that betrays the unfolded outline of a paper plane. Significantly, it captures that fleeting moment the child

he was changed his mind and made a toy out of a drawing, as though there was no distinct shift between these two modes of ‘reality’ the artist alludes to. In painting this image, what was a literal flight of fancy to the child (toy plane / cloud drawing) loses its simplicity, and becomes exponentially complex to the adult painter reflecting on this relic of lost innocence.

By reproducing these drawings on a large canvas, a poignant umbilical link is traced between spontaneous carefree childhood and the jaded reality of the adult. Yet the very act of remembering is futile, and what is remembered is its recollection, incrementally distancing itself and altering ever so slightly with each attempt. The same image viewed by the same person/ painter through another context reflects the artist’s anxieties and aspirations as a painter.

Singapore-based painter ELAINE NAVAS paints what appears like a cross between a Russian constructivist painting and a crystalline structure or geologic formation, but Bart’s Homework, a 6 x 6ft monochromatic canvas, is in fact based on her son’s school-art project—a cubistic assemblage composed of cones, cubes and cylinders. These basic forms incidentally make up the shapes traditionally copied in academic exercises to master the illusionistic presentation of volume and mass and light and shadow, so in a formalist sense, this becomes a return to basics. In another sense she also revisits her object-based theme, depicting still life and familiar everyday objects imbued with stark foreboding, which first earned her paintings recognition. Her recent body of works features a noticeable shift to more atmospheric elemental surfaces such as cloud formations, expansive bodies of water, or the bewildering green lushness of a jungle. Executed with her distinctive buttery swathes of paints, the once anxious strokes seem more reined and subdued, as if the shift from painting dense objects to painting aural open spaces has diffused the pent-up pressure build up within.

JUAN ALCAZAREN’s enamel on tarpaulin paintings, entitled Surface to Air 1 and Surface to Air 2, are like color field banners that play on our retinal and psychological perception of figure and ground. The green and yellow striped surface is splattered with a barrage of random black and white silhouettes, permeating the surface like a kind of visual flak the suggestive title might allude to. Like vandalized flags from some alien nation stenciled with ambiguous hybrid decals and logos, Alcazaren’s playful process recalls Letraset Action Transfer, a once-popular art-based children’s pastime that includes assorted readymade figures that can be composed on a prepared dramatic backdrop. His canvas is a virtual terrain of accumulated imagery, stratified sedimentary layers— it is like looking into an asymmetric kaleidoscopic viewfinder where random patterns constantly change. The graphic images and symbols are at once familiar and strange. Alcazaren reconfigures his old works to add another layer of meaning over the old one, each layer resonates with the previous one like an archeological site where invented signs and lost symbols can be unearthed.

BERNARDO PACQUING is perhaps the most physical painter in the group in terms of method and application of paint. His canvas exudes a primary rawness and density of material, often suggesting a weathered surface or topographic landscape shaped and defined by elemental forces. Noted for textural richness of chalky impastos, material density, and coarseness of his canvases; the wayward spatters, coagulated puddles, and flaky skins of paint betray Pacquing’s fetishistic fascination for the substance of paint and material. His broad strokes and gestures leave residual trail of creation suspended in time, analogous to the way a photograph suspends moments by trapping the bouncing rays of light on silver and paper. His large-panel mixed media piece, entitled Days After Steam, is rendered with a relatively wider range of colors compared to his early works characterized with the use of an austere palette. A series of triangular forms cascade towards the center as if dropped from an assembly line conveyor belt, and a cryptic text ‘POTATO MOTION’ is legibly written on the foreground—perhaps to invoke the era of the combustible piston engine, or perhaps as a metaphor for artistic propulsion and

the inevitable entropic state the creative process undergoes, subject to the laws of thermodynamics. A pillow immersed in paint is prominently secured in the heart of the canvas like some kind of captured trophy left out to dry. Pacquing often utilizes everyday domestic material detritus and discarded objects, and presents their hidden lyrical qualities, their elegiac poetry, and imbued transcendent nature. top left to right; JUAN ALCAZAREN Surface To Air 1 enamel and varnish on tarpaulin 152 x 183 cm / 2012 BERNARDO PACQUING Days After Steam mixed media / 244 x 244 cm diptych / 2011 HUBERT SAN JUAN Red; Red Hot neon lights with salvaged electric stove 30 x 30 cm each / 2012 NILO ILARDE Time For T collage / 39 x 32 cm framed / 2012

HUBERT SAN JUAN has a penchant for rummaging through discarded or surplus materials, transfiguring them, and reincarnating them as art objects or installations. Red; Red Hot comprise of a series of portable electric stoves (a ubiquitous appliance in the regular Filipino household) that looks conventional enough except that the coils are replaced with red neon filaments. The fool-the-eye prankster attitude echoes the Surrealists’ penchant for visual puns and linguistic double entendres, and is somehow reminiscent of one of Bruce Nauman’s photographs, Waxing Hot, from the seminal Eleven Color Photographs, where the free standing word ‘HOT’ is polished and buffed manually. Nauman’s literal interpretation borders on the lame joke but examines the ‘functional edges’ of language. Neon has become a recurring motif used by many installation artists in the country these days, and the work becomes a whimsical if not inadvertent aside on the Philippine contemporary art scene.

NILO ILARDE’s portable compact collages offer a visual refrain from the large canvases in this exhibition. Rather than the sense of immersion into the pictorial space the viewer experiences beholding the larger works, the intimate scale allows for contemplative scrutiny that it requires.

At first glance, the series might seem like arbitrary compositions but the more pieces one views of Ilarde’s collages the less random and the more methodical they appear: patterns become recognizable, a sense of order emerges, and details reveal the meticulous craft and attention allotted to each piece. Old wooden rulers dipped or daubed with beads of paint like makeshift palettes often frame his collages; while old sketches and pictures culled from art magazines provide the background. Other elements such as strings or pencils hint at rudimentary units of measurement, while pigments squeezed out straight from the tube suggest the protoplasmic ooze of creation, the building blocks, or DNA of the artwork. These recurring metaphors of ‘Creation’ echo Ilarde’s conviction that art comes from art, and from the memory of art.

As the curator of NO TALKING POINTS, NILO ILARDE relies on his innate grasp of three-dimensional space, and the intrinsic dynamics between the viewer and the artwork enclosed in the art space.

Ilarde does not espouse the rejection of theory—he complicitly acknowledges its necessity, yet insists on the precedence of art over theory. In most of the works in this exhibition, there is an underlying longing to return to the past, to reassess or reaffirm one’s conviction as artists and creators.

The subtexts of NO TALKING POINTS are manifold, some are more obvious, and some are less so. Ultimately, the exhibition seeks that fertile ground where language and its effectiveness as a means of communication are cancelled out by its capacity to misconstrue. It is in this realm that art or poetry operates.

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BERNARDO PACQUING (b. 1967) graduated from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 1989, and has been actively exhibiting and co-curating exhibitions since then. To date, he has exhibited extensively in the Philippines, and has participated in several exhibitions abroad.

Pacquing was the recipient of Thirteen Artists Awards (2000) from Cultural Center of the Philippines, Freeman Fellowship Grant (2000) from Vermont Studio Center, Grand Prize Winner (Painting NonRepresentational) in Open Art Competition organized by Art Association of the Philippines (1999, 1992), and Honorable Mention (1995, 1994) in Philippine Art Awards. Bernardo Pacquing lives and works in Manila, Philippines.

HUBERT SAN JUAN (b. 1959, Philippines) went to the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and the Philippine School of Interior Design before he launched his career in designing and building office and residential interiors for various clients.

Eventually major galleries contracted him to build or to renovate their spaces, and artists asked him to engineer and fabricate elements of their works, including complex installations—which spurred him to start creating his own works. To date, San Juan had participated in numerous group exhibitions at various galleries in Manila, and had mounted two solo exhibitions: Watch Out For Falling Debris (2007) and Brand Used, Slightly New (2011). Hubert San Juan lives and works in Manila, Philippines.

NILO ILARDE (b. 1960) graduated from University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts with Bachelor in Fine Arts majoring in Painting. Since 1978 to date, Ilarde has participated in various group exhibitions, and mounted his solo exhibitions in numerous venues in the Philippines. From 1984 to 1985 Ilarde was the exhibition director of Pinaglabanan Galleries in San Juan, Manila; and since 1980 till now he has been actively working as a guestcurator and curator of various exhibitions at Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila, University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, West Gallery, Finale Art Gallery, and many others. Nilo Ilarde was the recipient of Commended-Young Arts in Asia Now (1980) from Hong Kong Art Center, and Winner-Painting Category (1981) from Art Association of the Philippines. Nilo Ilarde lives and works in Manila, Philippines.

cover artwork, right; Nilo Ilarde / Undertones Of War collage / 39 x 32 cm framed / 2012 cover artwork, left; Nilo Ilarde / Cube collage / 39 x 32 cm framed / 2012

TAKSU is a leading contemporary art gallery and specialist in Southeast Asia. Representing selections of fine art with distinctive urban edge, we are at the forefront of contemporary art in this region. TAKSU works to forge a platform for established and emerging artists to share their pool of creativity and knowledge through its residency programs and exhibitions. Encapsulating the true meaning of the word TAKSU; divine inspiration, energy, and spirit.

Suherwan Abu Director, TAKSU Galleries

NO TALKING POINTS

BERNARDO PACQUING CRIS VILLANUEVA ELAINE NAVAS HUBERT SAN JUAN JUAN ALCAZAREN LYLE BUENCAMINO NILO ILARDE

_ ISBN 978 - 981- 07-1509- 0 PAPERBACK

978 - 981- 07-1510 - 6 E-BOOK

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