Reflection of the times

Three artists recently launched their exhibitions at Artinformal last 14 August in Karrivin Plaza, Pasong Tamo extension, Makati city.

Mark Andy Garcia and Neil Pasilan’s “Tulog na, sumasagot pa” is an exhibition uniting two painters whose intuitive approach to material gives the images sketch-like quality of a reverie, which contains the peace and the fever of the half-seen, half-known, half-dreamed.

Garcia and Pasilan present individual works and two collaborative pieces. They both share an affinity with modern painters who have relied on the immediacy of form to convey something internal and visceral.

Pasilan’s spontaneous mark-making, his figures, recall naïve painting wherein the untrained hand suggests the archetype of the unrestrained mind. The self-taught painter marks spaces of seclusion — where a girl is deep in prayer, and lovers drift in the water by a burning light — or a wilderness dotted with symbols, icons or silhouettes.

Garcia’s paintings are without human presence, but one imagines movement in the way he varies color and how it may unravel emotional content or open up paths to the immaterial, whether psyche or spirituality. Aspects of his open-air scenes are nods to the works of modern painters: Picasso’s blue period and Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Through imagined scenes, Garcia proceeds to re-orient the thought behind a familiar trope or color.

Garcia and Pasilan’s works are filled with small discrete moments and the churn of the dreaming mind. In these compositions, one finds fragments, symbols, impressions, auras, glimmers caught on the vibrations of a surface.

In a separate solo exhibition, Vien Valencia’s mind-blowing “perimeters” taps into the spaces that shape access and restriction. Using passports, decommissioned prisoner uniforms and time recorders, his works reflect on the tools, papers, uniforms, routines and language through which identity is constructed, withheld or erased. Engaging with materials and metaphors of confinement and escape, the artist questions the very notion of an “outside”: is there truly a space beyond control, or are our exits always already mapped? Your guess is as good as mine.

Check these stories of men that are not just personal narratives, but are a reflection of the times.