Art requires a certain devotion to practice. It is its slow climb to magnificence.

The practice of music requires the same arduous task to surmount even the limits of a composed piece. Étude is what it is meant for: it aims a perfection of skill and serves as a platform for exhibiting such skill. Its own end is how it is being played: to play with sheer abandonment and with such endearing embrace to a continued mastery. There lies the virtue to such commitment, however vain and isolating it is at the same time.

Bernardo Pacquing and Juan Alcazaren’s exhibit, Études for More than Two Hands, is premised on such an idea; moreover, on the inextricable link between music and art, on their unabashed impulse to create and how they mirror each other’s muses at some point.

Most works in the show reference this seeming symbiosis in the use of broken parts of discarded violins and pianos, the classical romance of such brought to fore by the patina of antiquity: in a violin bow encased in resin (“Bow”), in old leather casings ripped and flattened underneath a row of used timber (“f-hole”), in a vintage piano suffocated by a flow of cotton pillow stuffing, in a tangle of rusted piano strings going through and around a rubber tire interior (“Air in D String – J. S. Bach”), and in a rather jocular restaging of Paul Dukas’ symphonic poem popularized by Disney’s Fantasia, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” where a rotating red plastic drinking straw sticks out of a column of concrete water pipes.

The titles of the works amplify this even more—apart from the numerous referencing to J. S. Bach, whose greatest legacy in Western classical music is the introduction of counterpoints in a composition, which serve to amplify the main melodic theme. This is whimsically induced in 2 works: ”Concerto for 2 Violins – J. S. Bach” and in ”Chaconne for Solo Violin.” They both comprise of a violin resting on top of a paint tin and drenched in white latex paint, with the latter playing as an imitative counterpoint as a miniature version of the former. The piece invoked in the title is described as a slow-paced composition, a largo ma non tanto, as to accompany perhaps the slow drip of paint unto the floor.

A regular rhythmic pace is invoked however, in the piece ”half-notes, full-notes,” where various vessel molds and plastic soda bottles are cast in plaster and set on top of mirrors, forming a checkerboard-pattern with the concrete floor. The varying heights of the cast objects conjure craters and valleys that gleam on the surface of the moon.

This serves as a stark contrast to another work, where a work table has seemingly been upturned by the weight of various colored clumps of clay spilled onto the floor. The mound formed by these clumps of clay resemble a messy volcanic flow, but their very concentration upon a central apex belie the apparent chaos of their individually lumpy parts.

It is these two works that elucidate the necessary conjunction of order and chaos. Not one superseding the other for they feed off each other’s limits: both spontaneously regenerative of their characteristic structure, the excesses of each other swinging in a metronomic pendulum.

This dictum of balance is surreptitiously subscribed to by forces of resistance and flow as well, as eloquently seen in ”The Nerve to Draw” series and the video work ”Do Some False Notes so I Know You are Human.” Though contrasting in medium, they complement each other in exposing and amplifying the mechanics of an exercise gainfully adapted by anatomy through years of practiced drawing. It is commonly believed that the pulse, that beating valve of vein beneath one’s wrist, is the one responsible for lending such innate grace to a drawing or a work. Where the bloodstream is exposed in ”Do Some False Notes so I Know You are Human,” ”The Nerve to Draw” series shows a pair of hands applying pressure to certain parts of another; it is drawn with such muscular robustness with a ballpoint pen, set against an indigo field of dense irregular strokes on leatherette—a surface which in itself is imitative of skin yet resistant to osmotic penetration. The unevenness lends it the creator’s unique carpal imprint. What then is the aim of such ardent devotion, if in its expectant predictions of course, the accidents and missteps still lie ahead? Nothing is given up, if not for being eternal apprentices to the practice at hand. To dispel and expose the enchantment of such an accomplishment may be a more grave disappointment than knowing too much of the cause of it, or being endlessly beholden to the enchantment of creation that compels man to his own art.

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