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拍品专文
Well-known for her photorealist portraits of sitters with their backs turned to the viewer, another defining artistic trajectory for Nona Garcia has been exploring the symbolism of using the X-Ray as a medium for artistic expression. Concerned with uncovering and portraying a shared essence beneath surface distinctions, A Series of Fractures (Lot 677) brings together a selection of everyday manmade and biological materials that under X-Ray, are made strange. Light flares and movement captured in the X-Ray films further blur rigid outlines, and Garcia enacts a radical democratization of unlike objects by altering the filter through which they are perceived.
Scraps of Memory and Chance Happenings (Lot 678) is a continuation of the 'shattered', derelict interiors depicted by Filipino artist Arturo Sanchez, whom was recently awarded the Philip Morris award in 2014 for this series of work. Taut energy vibrates through the work, capturing a transient moment within a single frame. A symbol of passage and a nexus through which the outside world enters a cloistered room, a window contains a myriad of associations and passing reflections. Sanchez illustrates this sentiment in vignettes embedded in mirrors, his artistic signature. Sanchez moves away from using mirrors as embellishments to making them necessary: the mirrors in this piece are central to the drama. With its arresting filmic quality, Scraps of Memory and Chance Happenings is an invitation to remember and immortalize the immediacy of thought and feeling that come rushing forth in a moment of action.
Jonathan Ching's Languishing, Glorying, Glowing (Lot 679) presents an alternate present for Manet's work and Manet himself. In Ching's fictionalized account, Manet-the controversial French painter who planted the seeds for Impressionism-is banished to a garret, unseen and unloved. If Languishing, Glorying, Glowing is visual storytelling that appropriates art-historical artifacts for its own ends, then Ching does leave hints of a happy ending in his thick swirling impasto: his artwork itself is an Impressionist heir of Manet's legacy. The play of light on the creased white cloth, the freewheeling brushstrokes, and the vibrant tactile surface of Ching's canvas tell us that Manet somehow made it out of history's attic.
The three-dimensional copper roses, capable of being plucked from the painting and gathered into a bouquet if one is so inclined, is a requiem of sorts-solidified grief, in Ching's words-as well as a nod to William Ernest Henley's poem "A Bowl of Roses" (from which the title of the work is taken):
It was a bowl of roses: There in the light they lay, Languishing, glorying, glowing Their life away. /And the soul of them rose like a presence, Into me crept and grew, And filled me with something-someone- O, was it you?
Impressionistic in technique and narrative, Demo on How Myths Are Made (Lot 680), is a restless picture-inchoate, indistinct, and open to interpretation. Artist Buen Calubayan deems the phrase "controlled chaos" an accurate description of his work on several levels. Globs of pigment rush to the center, forming an indeterminate hillock. Gentle waves of burgundy ebb in from the right, mirrored overhead by a swath of sapphire sky. The movement leads the eye left-of-center, where a group of five individuals has gathered. The five figures anchor us within the swirling chaos of colours and brush strokes, and culminate in a visual representation of the act of remembering. Recalling a pastoral simplicity tied to associations of family, and gatherings by the beach, Calubayan searches for this lost innocence within his canvas. A commentary on the construction of myth as the reconfiguration of shared memory, Demo on How Myths Are Made awaits the perspective of the viewer for its completion.
Scraps of Memory and Chance Happenings (Lot 678) is a continuation of the 'shattered', derelict interiors depicted by Filipino artist Arturo Sanchez, whom was recently awarded the Philip Morris award in 2014 for this series of work. Taut energy vibrates through the work, capturing a transient moment within a single frame. A symbol of passage and a nexus through which the outside world enters a cloistered room, a window contains a myriad of associations and passing reflections. Sanchez illustrates this sentiment in vignettes embedded in mirrors, his artistic signature. Sanchez moves away from using mirrors as embellishments to making them necessary: the mirrors in this piece are central to the drama. With its arresting filmic quality, Scraps of Memory and Chance Happenings is an invitation to remember and immortalize the immediacy of thought and feeling that come rushing forth in a moment of action.
Jonathan Ching's Languishing, Glorying, Glowing (Lot 679) presents an alternate present for Manet's work and Manet himself. In Ching's fictionalized account, Manet-the controversial French painter who planted the seeds for Impressionism-is banished to a garret, unseen and unloved. If Languishing, Glorying, Glowing is visual storytelling that appropriates art-historical artifacts for its own ends, then Ching does leave hints of a happy ending in his thick swirling impasto: his artwork itself is an Impressionist heir of Manet's legacy. The play of light on the creased white cloth, the freewheeling brushstrokes, and the vibrant tactile surface of Ching's canvas tell us that Manet somehow made it out of history's attic.
The three-dimensional copper roses, capable of being plucked from the painting and gathered into a bouquet if one is so inclined, is a requiem of sorts-solidified grief, in Ching's words-as well as a nod to William Ernest Henley's poem "A Bowl of Roses" (from which the title of the work is taken):
It was a bowl of roses: There in the light they lay, Languishing, glorying, glowing Their life away. /And the soul of them rose like a presence, Into me crept and grew, And filled me with something-someone- O, was it you?
Impressionistic in technique and narrative, Demo on How Myths Are Made (Lot 680), is a restless picture-inchoate, indistinct, and open to interpretation. Artist Buen Calubayan deems the phrase "controlled chaos" an accurate description of his work on several levels. Globs of pigment rush to the center, forming an indeterminate hillock. Gentle waves of burgundy ebb in from the right, mirrored overhead by a swath of sapphire sky. The movement leads the eye left-of-center, where a group of five individuals has gathered. The five figures anchor us within the swirling chaos of colours and brush strokes, and culminate in a visual representation of the act of remembering. Recalling a pastoral simplicity tied to associations of family, and gatherings by the beach, Calubayan searches for this lost innocence within his canvas. A commentary on the construction of myth as the reconfiguration of shared memory, Demo on How Myths Are Made awaits the perspective of the viewer for its completion.