Bencab Museum

MESSAGE FROM THE GROUND by Welbart Slowhands and Abi Dionisio

Exactly a year ago, artist Abi Dionisio reflected on the great and unprecedented deluge in our modern history that continues to adversely affect every life possible, regardless of age and race, across the world. As she accepted the seemingly debilitating horrors of the pandemic that continues to isolate everyone from each other to preserve what is left of life, she labored her hands in threadwork to create embroidered moving images of hope and strength to represent the unwavering commitment and dedication of the people at the face of this human threat to save and keep the rest of us safe. Because she also wanted to capture their gargantuan sacrifices that go behind each act of service, she painted the backside of each threadwork on her canvas to show how the seamy thread lines and incoherent knots make the frontside we often only see most invitingly beautiful and inspiring. Seven months ago, with all her might, she contributed her painterly talent and communicative depth to the artistic dialogue of art as a universal language of healing through her first international solo in London. True to her anchor, she invited everyone “to see the rainbow, promised in the story of Noah’s ark, at the end of these challenging times. That one day, when the sky begins to clear, and the sun starts to shine, and the seas slowly calm, a rainbow of a new day will arch across the sky. Until that day comes, we continue to find the strength and faith within us and live through because there is Noah In Us.” Unfortunately, the world is still very much in the course of the pandemic, struggling with little wins but fighting with every ounce of a united hope. And as an artist whose years have been dedicated to isolation in order to produce artistic body of works, she continues to reflect on what might possibly be for us at the end of this phase. In their fourth two-artist exhibition, Dionisio and Welbart invite us to see what possibly awaits us at the most anticipated end of this borderless human struggle—when we are already allowed to leave our Noah’s ark to see again the world we dearly miss, hand in hand. Despite the profound evolution, not shift, of his artistry, Welbart remains consistently true to his anchor as an artist—to only speak his truth. Known for his critically acclaimed and highly celebrated nude figures set in outstanding chiaroscuro, he unmasks them after years of hiding their troubles and emotions within. Finding strength in truth, one by one, he reveals their faces painted in almost alabaster skin, indicative of years of being kept, but in complete solitude. For each figure, he carefully paints a crown of embroidered words he curated from years of his own self-fought battles. Each portraiture of Welbart is a powerful visual psycho-emotional autobiography. Each is a personal invitation to his state of being that is continuously searching for meaning and relevance, but remains grounded on his ideals and values. Even before the pandemic hit us, his artistic evolution has been immersing audiences in creative spirituality as a medium to inculcate respect for self, others, and the environment. As the world continues to survive, and hopefully thrive, in isolation, his portraitures pay tribute to the rebirthing of our forests and seas and the restoration of our mental and spiritual beings in the process. To continue her creative narrative, Dionisio embroiders and paints for the first time the beautiful natural chemistry of flora and fauna. She introduces these new elements painted in a vibrant palette and dynamic movements. Using double exposure treatment, she carefully overlaps her images of life with her symbol of voyage. With remarkable precision, she captures the bravery of the blue tiger, woven in the panels of the ship, and the assured hope that the lovely birds, set against the magnificent hues of clouds and space, may bring as they continue to search for rich, solid ground to land on after a long journey of isolation in our Noah’s ark. From the very beginning of this artistic journey of togetherness, Dionisio and Welbart always see our Noah’s ark as a means to be safe and not of escape. And as we continue to go through surviving, physically alone and isolated but collectively united, it is their fervent hope that through their collective creative pursuit, we are moved to believe that there is a promise of new and better tomorrows. But for now, we continue living our lives, albeit distant and isolated from each other, while patiently waiting for the Message From The Ground. - Prim Paypon About The Artists ABI DIONISIO Abi Dionisio is an acclaimed contemporary Filipino artist known for her visual tableaux of intricate embroidery and lyrical representational painting. Despite her young age, she has already garnered several prestigious awards, locally and internationally, including First Prize at the Art Association of the Philippines’ Annual Art Competition 2009; Top 12 Semi-Finalist at 2011 and 2012 Metrobank Foundation Art Competition in Manila, Philippines; Juror’s Choice Award and National Awardee at the 2015-2016 Philippine Art Awards; Global Finalist at Art Renewal Center’s 2014-2015 International Arc Salon Competition in Port Reading, New Jersey, USA to name a few. Because of her numerous accolades and remarkable contributions to Philippine contemporary art, she received the prestigious Gintong Kabataan (Golden Youth) Award for Visual Arts in 2017 from Hiyas ng Malolos in Bulacan, Philippines. A coveted artist, her works have been exhibited in eight solo and sixty-five group shows in Hong Kong (Conrad Hotel for Asia Contemporary Art Show), London (8th solo exhibition at Saatchi Gallery and One East Asia at The Westbury Hotel, Mayfair), Philippines (Altromondo Gallery, Art Center, Art Fair Philippines, Ayala Museum, BenCab Museum, Finale Art File, Provenance Art Gallery, Ysobel Art Gallery, Yuchengco Museum), Singapore (One East Asia), Taiwan (28th Asian Art International Exhibition). Born in 1987 in the City of Malolos in Bulacan, Philippines, she earned a BFA Major in Advertising from Bulacan State University in 2009. She continues to stitch and paint in Bulacan, Philippines. WELBART Welbart is a celebrated contemporary Filipino artist best known for his powerful psycho-emotional autobiographical visual compositions. An award-winning artist, he has joined and won in various important national competitions from 2005 to 2016 including the 2016, 2013, and 2006 GSIS Art Competition; 2008 Philippine Drawing Society; 2005 and 2004 Metrobank Art and Design Excellence; and 2005 and 2004 Art Association of the Philippines’ Annual Art Competition. He is also the founder and mentor of ArtZoo, a collective of Bulacan-based visual artists whose professional careers are now dominating the local art scene. Because of his outstanding contributions as a visual artist, an art collective builder, and an art mentor, he was awarded the Natatanging Paombongeño sa Larangan ng Sining at Kultura in 2006. A religiously hard-working artist, his works have been exhibited in ten solo and fifty-six group shows to date, from 2000 to present. His works have been exhibited in Japan (PINTOKYO 2018 in Tokyo), London (Larasati Auctioneers at The Westbury Hotel, Mayfair), Philippines (Altromondo Gallery, Art Center, Ayala Museum, BenCab Museum, Finale Art File, Pinto Art Museum, Provenance Art Gallery, Secret Fresh Gallery, Village Art Gallery, The Big and Small Art Co, Ysobel Art Gallery), Singapore (One East Asia), Taiwan (28th Asian Art International Exhibition), and USA (ERENSIA at Philippine Center, New York City). Born in 1971 in Pampanga, Philippines, he is a self-taught artist who finished a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

Art Cube Gallery

Reset by Lawrence Cervantes

30 April to 22 May 2021

Lawrence Cervantes was born in 1993. He acquired a degree in Visual Communication from Bulacan State University. He’s also in graduate school for a degree in Education Major in Arts Management at the La Consolacion University. Cervantes delves on the mystical journey of soul and spirit. Having been deeply exposed to the religious perspective in his earlier days, the subject of one’s soul is a recurring subject matter for his works. His sepia-like renderings mostly feature people situated in subtly surreal environments. He often experiments with impasto to convey intense elements and subjects in his canvas.

Art Agenda, S.E.A.

Criterion

6 - 15 May 2021

The exhibition features a bi-weekly evolving collection of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art illustrating the key criteria of quality, authenticity, provenance, condition and rarity that we look for in a collectable work of art. Works of Singapore second-generation artists Tan Choh Tee, Anthony Poon and Arthur Yap amongst others are featured in the first iteration. Click here for more info: https://www.artagendasea.org/exhibition/criterion

Ateneo Art Gallery

Marciano Galang Acquisition Prizes and AAG-KLFI Essay Writing Prizes Exhibition

Available for online viewing until May 2021

In place of the 16th Ateneo Art Awards program in 2020, the Ateneo Art Gallery pivoted towards an acquisition prize and an essay writing prize to extend assistance to visual artists and writers who have been greatly affected by the COVID-19 crisis. With support from program partners, the Embassy of Italy and the Kalaw-Ledesma Foundation Inc., Filipino artists and writers were encouraged to submit works that reflect the struggles, initiatives, and expressions of hope during these trying times. Click here to view the exhibition: https://bit.ly/MGAPExhibition This online exhibit features the 54 works on paper selected for exhibition for the Ateneo Art Gallery - Marciano Galang Acquisition Prizes, and short excerpts from the 12 winning entries in the AAG-KLFI Essay Writing Prizes. The full essays are posted at AAG and KLFI's Vital Points website: https://pkl.ateneoartgallery.com **The Ateneo Art Gallery is still closed to the public until further notice. For updates about these exhibits, visit our website at www.ateneoartgallery.com or send us an email at aag@ateneo.edu.

Primo Marella Gallery

Ruben Pang – True Solarization

25 February- 20 May 2021

Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to announce “True solarization” Ruben Pang’ third solo exhibition at the gallery in Milan. TRUE SOLARIZATION "We do not know where the great light was born, whether from the outside or from the inside, and when it has disappeared, we say: it was interior, yet it was not interior. There is no need to ask where it appeared, because there is no point of origin here; it does not start from one place to go to another but appears and does not appear. Therefore, we must not chase it, but wait quietly until it reveals itself, as the eye waits for the sun to rise, which rises to the horizon and offers itself to our eyes to be contemplated. " Plotinus, Enneade V 5,8 (On Beauty) Sigmund Freud defines artistic talent as flexibility of removal because according to his thesis the unconscious is more easily accessible for the artist and therefore can proceed in this dimension between the conscious and the unconscious to intercept his artistic intuitions. The creative act becomes a pendular movement between conscious and unconscious impulses, while serving as a gradual process of raising one’s consciousness. Everything is based on the idea of a creative chaos as the true origin of artistic creation. Pang's works are often containers of this chaos where we find an entropic force, the fundamental law of nature on which the ecosystem and therefore life depends. Entropy was used by Rudolph Clausius in 1850, in the second law of thermodynamics, to indicate the correlation between physical state transition and energy production. “What is counterintuitive about painting, is that you are choosing to suspend movement, to arrest chaos, to defy gravity, to levitate. When you lift a brush away from a painting, where you decide to stop blending, when you decide to leave passages to dry, is where the attention and focus needs to be, even more so than the application, gesture, or movement. Paint being moved around, for me, is experienced through the skin and muscles, but choosing when to stop, is done with the eyes and a conversation with the heart.” Clausius verified that at each change of state, with the consequent production or dispersion of energy, there is an increasing disorder in the structure of matter. According to this theory, the same word entropy was then applied in other fields, from mathematical theory of probability to information theory, psycholinguistics, and quantum physics. The writer Thomas Pynchon gives us his definition of entropic disorder correlated with communication, coming to theorize a progressive loss of meaning of words because it is emptied of substance by excessively focusing on concept. It can reasonably be said art potentially loses its own sense if it progressively overworked and emptied. In this land between chaos and potential opportunities, Pang creates his own universe and reminds us: “You can create a world, but you can't shape everything.” The communicative emotion that he transmits to us through his paintings reflect the structures of language in unlikely associations. Similarly, we use slang/expressions in everyday communication that oppose grammatical rules, within painting, elements of disorder lubricate the transition from information into messages. Pang approaches his painting, specifically in his relationship with color, assigning them personalities and associations on top of their technical qualities, with whimsically misaligned elements to strengthen a reception of potential passages the composition can embark on. “I tend not to think of colors in terms of their harmony or combinations that are known to create a certain effect. My experience of color is that each tint, shade, tone, and hue have a personal antecedent. In End of School for instance, I thought of flooding the atmosphere with the colors that correspond to the scent, packaging and scenes associated with a menthol cigarette: the 1990s, nostalgia, benign teenage delinquency. It was meant to simulate the “haze” of looking back in time. Every color is a memory, an aspiration, an attitude. And I prefer to think of the forms and colors of a painting as a collection of attitudes.” According to the well-known art critic Greenberg, theorist of American modernism, the form of a work of art would be the state in which it leaves the norms and conventions of the artistic medium. For Greenberg, the artist seems to work against the resistance of his own medium and under his pressure and it is therefore assumed that, consciously, he dominates its conventions. The artist produces images, forms, narrations but starting from the deconstruction of his experience, of his past, of what disturbs him, of outdated tragedies and hidden fears, casting the shadow of a memory that seems to come from nowhere. “Showing up and being honest with yourself leads to a dialogue between previous scenarios in a painting—it is a dialogue between your experience with the material, the flux and volatility of oils and pigments, and the desire to have the fruits of opposing ideals; to keep the happy accident while realizing a vision, to be direct in intention, yet moved and deceived by illusions, to find a limit, effortlessly. The nature of the painting game is that as new things develop, other things yield. At times, I feel an “opening” in a developing picture, a magnetism towards something mysterious, refractory, or suspended. If I put aside my initial ambitions for the composition, I am convinced that the painting is painting itself.” During this process of deconstruction and construction of his works, Pang does not set limits, and through a stream of consciousness, he creates layers of paint, modifies the pre-existing ones, and redefines their contours spontaneously. Evidently, for Pang, the painting frame, its outline, is a limes, a border that separates two lands and the tangible sign (often identified with a stone) that defines what is inside and outside. Limiting is an act of definition, it is an act of border creation between lived reality and its representation, in a nutshell, it is the most archaic manifestation of individual control and of the creation of identity. In this reading, control and identity therefore seem to correspond as if they were an obsessive response to the question: who are we? “Do you hunt ideas down or seed them? Do you need to shape every form or allow things to develop without meddling? Is there space in the painting for anything other than yourself?” We often have the impression that to better see the outside world and consequently our life, we must move away from everyday life, from reality. According to Foucault, the hermeneutical approach towards a work of art is characterized by the search for what has not been said, for what is hidden from the evidence of the sign and which would constitute the ultimate truth of the work of art. Pang, on the other hand, promotes research that is based on the creative moment and analyzes its relationships: the relationship between the author and the work, the relationship between the author and the environment and the relationship between the author, the work and his time. “We are fortunate now, to have immediate access to the expanse of art history, and in a sense, we are always time-traveling. I find it comforting that the lessons and contributions of artists who lived centuries apart, for instance, Bruegel, Rubens and David Reed, are intimately present and accessible simultaneously.” “A question that painters are asked often is ‘How do you know when a painting is done?’. You recognize something that you’ve never seen before, not through its image, but by how far you are displaced internally—depersonalization is my compass.” Depersonalization in this context refers to the detachment and letting go of the initial intentions or ambitions for the artwork, by oscillating his focus between a vision in his mind’s eye and the physical situation of paint’s volatility, recognizing that the nature of painting is unprecise in translating thought, but presents several opportunities for what he considers magic. Relationship between artist and environment: “Skywriters and Prism are two paintings of the same dimensions made with similar materials but with a drastically different result. In Skywriters, I painted in a very small space, almost seated at a desk all the time—i wanted to give the effect as if it were painted by a gnome, as if the frame of 60 x 75 cm was further than the horizon. It was also the first painting done after moving from Singapore to Sardinia, and it was done as a kind of initiation, “breaking in” and trying to find my footing in a new space. Prism was realized as a counterpoint to larger paintings of 220 x 150 cm, in the context of a larger studio that I had set-up, over the months. To reinforce the contrasts in approach from other works, I only used a large brush throughout the process and refrained from delineating any shape or figures within a single movement. I approached it as if I were allergic to the marks that could give away a human touch or personality.” Pang’s approach to artistic creation is like a stream of consciousness, something that the artist is unable to stem but which is composed on the substrate as a trace of his experience. The generating intuition, the creative act, the personal content, the psychological and human implications are the basis of his artistic poetics: man is at the center of his universe; his system of relations between the single components of a work is always sought because this structuralism is indicative of the research that pervades his poetics. Structuralism is a methodology that has established itself since the early twentieth century in various sciences, based on the assumption that each object of study constitutes a structure, that is, it constitutes an organic and global whole whose elements have no autonomous functional value but assume it within distinctive relations of each element with respect to the others of the whole. The structural interest that outlines the conformation of a work in compositions such as Familial Ties, Solace and Individuality and End of School, abandons geometric lines and constructions to open up to Classical planes and compositions. This material structuralism is also witnessed in Michelangelo's work, The Last Judgment. However, Pang moves towards the direction of the eighteenth-century painter Alessandro Magnasco, where there is a sign of ambiguity in his compositions and forms, giving us the impression of an animation that starts from within. We find in many of Pang's works a dialectic of opposites, a dialectic understood within the pictorial corpus in the making, with the colors and stratifications of architecture that guides us in this sense of an absence-presence. “In the painting world, I get to insist that flesh becomes sky, earth can be inhaled. In Prism, for instance, I would like to create a sense of pressurized atmosphere, flesh and soil form a throat or a door. In End of School, liquid walls encompass a glacial anthropomorphic tree seeded from fire and children. In Familial Ties and History of Defensive Gardens respectively, a head in the former and a torso in the latter, becomes a portal. In Choleric, and in Ionosphere, what is usually regarded as the background of a painting becomes the protagonist of the scene. Here the play in composition is informed by music—jazz drums. The emphasis on the upbeat in jazz is transposed into the composition of painting: let space be the start of the show, let absence be the fulcrum.” In Pang’s paintings it may seem that there is an indetermination of the forms, but his language serves to delineate of the conflict of a lived experience. It appears external and superior forces act to outline his subjects in the flux of painterly events. We see a parallelism in the film L'Eclisse by Antonioni, the story of an unlikely love between two protagonists who live in a world without moral or psychological determination, where everything is independent of individual will or any logic of cause and effect. This allegory is a critique of our society. Pang's paintings share a common denominator of being pervaded by a vital force engulfed by the reality that surrounds it, as if magical currents bind human subjects to the objects that surround them. It does so as a gesture of provocation, not an end in itself, but as a gesture of stimulation towards a new level of cognitive reasoning of reality, as found in the work of the Dada artists who altered the order and physical size of words. As Whitehead states in Adventures of Ideas: “There is in every period a general form of the form of thought: and like the air we breathe that form is so translucent, so pervasive and so evidently necessary, that, with only an effort extreme we manage to become aware of it. " Thus, Pang's vision reflects a combination of painterly traditions, remote cultural influences, scholastic attitude, and technical needs and is at the same time, the daughter of an era, of a general feeling that brings the viewer of the work, like a theatrical performance, towards "consciously growing self-suggestions". Similarly, the repertoire of epic literature also aims to identify the viewer with the characters represented. Greek tragedy is based on the contrast between the character and the actions of the hero, between his moral greatness and his senseless, often self-destructive deeds. This contrast does not develop to a real conflict because the hero, an unconscious victim of his own fate, transgresses the divine order only when it is already in progress. Pang in his narration causes the hero to stop a moment before his annihilation, before the spiritual mystical fire envelops him; as in Lunar Snow, which is the successor to End of School, where he crosses the boundaries of narration to head towards new horizons via simplification and emptying, a distillation of the chromatic chart to include only that which is necessary. In a mannerist thought of the relationship between man and environment, Pang’s varying works are united (and dominated) by ambiguity—the ambiguity of human existence and the double nature of man. Text by Lorenzo Belli

Art Verité Gallery

Procession of the Slightly Mad

6-15 May 2021

S-Ann Ch'i | Brian Uhing Art Verité presents the two-artist show, Procession of the Slightly Mad by Brian Uhing and S-Ann Ch’i. The exhibition is an unlikely pairing of two creative trajectories: Uhing hews closely to figurative surrealism while S-Ann Ch’i embodies the tenets of gestural abstraction. Their different temperaments notwithstanding, the exhibition showcases how generative and fruitful it is to think beyond the concerns of theme but instead focus on more subtle traits of the painting medium, such as energy, exuberance, and engagement. For more information, visit http://artverite.net/