Tag Archives: art review

kultura

The Singapore Biennale 2016: An Excess of Rhetoric

The mapping of art and nations through a biennale is a foregone conclusion when it is both premise and project, specifically in the case of the Singapore Biennale, the past two editions of which (2011 and 2013) were heavily contextualized in or concerned with the championing of Southeast Asian (SEA) art and artists – no matter the requisite works chosen from across Asia and beyond. The task, conscious or unconscious, is that of representation.

One imagines this could be a burden for any curatorial team. After all, (re)presenting SEA at this point is more complex than just mouthing post-colonial clichés. It demands of us a nuanced, critical stance that engages with the more difficult questions about ourselves, beyond what we have been made to believe as (post-)colonial subjects. It is a complicated conversation that needs to be had if we are to move forward as a region, which might also be why it’s easier to avoid it altogether.

Sadly, this is what the Singapore Biennale’s 2016 edition did: fall back on the platitudes and banalities that present SEA as a region that is built upon discourses on identity and independence, history and geography. It went for the easy, evading the challenge of representing SEA in all its complexity and contradiction.  (more…)

kultura

Blaspheming against the bul-ol

There is no looking at Ronald Ventura’s work without having in the back of my head that $1.1M dollar record-breaking sale at the 2011 Sotheby’s auction. In 2012 it seems he’s also had a good run at art auctions such as the Christie’s auction in Hong Kong last last year, which shouldn’t be a surprise really. Between the interest in Southeast Asian art and 2011’s record-breaking sale, it would seem strange if Ventura were not to ride that wave.

It is a wave of course that might not go in the direction of home, at least as far as putting together an exhibit is concerned, and this might have been why “Watching the Watchmen” (at the Vargas Museum in December) ultimately interested me: why would you exhibit at home at this point? What for? Underappreciated as the arts are, no matter how critically and globally acclaimed, why care at all to engage with this nation on the level of one’s artmaking? In the same breath, what would nation get out of something it refuses to acknowledge as important?

(more…)

kultura

art art art!

these were up elsewhere that i love because they are untouched, unexpurgated, and i’m left to fawn or freak out and everything in between. art can only be about how it makes you feel eh?

(1) Pilipinas Street Plan at the Lopez Museum’s Extensions. (2) The end of the art world via Kin Misa’s rust and color. (3) J Pacena’s After Mall Hours. (4) the Pinoy toy as art form and mythmaking.

(1)

pilipinas street plan still at Lopez Museum

kultura

Lee Navas Olazo rock the new year!

A two-man one-woman show featuring Romeo Lee, Elaine Navas and Jonathan Olazo (Manila Contemporary, 2314 Pasong Tamo Ext), opens the year 2010 with a bang of bold strokes and crazy textures. The diversity of course lies in the kind of works that these three artists are famous for, a diversity that necessarily lies in form, but more importantly in subject matter.

It’s Navas’ three panels that capture the eye upon entering the gallery, with her signature impasto technique and an amalgamation of green. The four panels that make up “Asborbed” “Found” and “In Between” could easily be different angles of the same forest rendered in still life. What makes it unique is Navas’ use of a technique that seems to bring this forest to life, engaging the spectator in the familiarity of the moment captured: the trees and leaves all tangled up, a bit of sunlight cutting through the chaos. It calls out to the spectator in the way the unknown does, where being in between is the same as being found, as one is absorbed into discovery as well.

In “Wishingbone” Navas’ still life isn’t so much about the engagement with what’s familiar, but a rendering of the familiar into strangeness. The wishing bone, which connotes hope, is shown as a headless fish skeleton hanging upside down, a query into the idea of a wishingbone and what it is in truth: a surrender, an end in itself, a moment up in the air. It’s this same suspension of belief that is apparent in Navas’ two other works “Solo” and “Pink Mutations”, as both work with crumpled unidentifiable forms that seem to be moving on the canvas. The latter merges together the forms using shades of pink that interact with and into each other; the former works with contrasting colors, both moving differently and seemingly extraneous from each other, creating a dynamism that’s difficult to miss. (more…)