In The Clear Light, Pardo de Leon, Jet Melencio, and Jed Escueta let go of preconceived notions about art and other delusions, evoking an emptiness and reduction of both form and process. The title signifies a clarity one achieves with advanced meditation or death, when the mind is cleared of everything and becomes one with the primordial universe. Curated by Roberto Chabet, the exhibition addresses the current muddled state of contemporary painting and photography, suggesting a way out and the possibility of transcendence.

Pardo de Leon turns her back on painting, removing surface, color, and image, leaving viewers with the blank side of the canvas. The untrained mind will easily assume that there is nothing to see, that it is all too abstract and distant. But in reality, her sandwiched paintings are all about painting distilled to its bare essences: stretcher, canvas, and paint. Similarly, she pares down a kayak to its skeletal frame, a precise yet effortless suggestion of disappearing into the horizon.

Jet Melencio comes full circle with his map works, beginning with the idea of photographing the gallery’s floor and ending finally with tracings, one of the earliest forms of representation. Entitled “The First Bardo,” the first stage of death when “one momentarily enjoys a perfect balance before descending to the lower states,” the work, appropriately installed on stilted tables, alludes not only to the tremulous quality of the surface / image but also to “the instability of the human consciousness.”

Jed Escueta’s series of photographs capture the heavens in the infinitely small and fleeting split seconds: compacted ash from a pipe load appearing as tiny celestial bodies and his shots at making the perfect smoke ring in the shape of a star. Infinity is said to reside in these psychedelic-induced moments, which are often likened to the state when one attains liberation of the mind.

The works in this exhibition all share the same path. They strip art of its artifice and forego all its pretensions, retaining only what is necessary and essential to the form. They reveal a heightened awareness of the interrelatedness of separate materials and objects, a way of seeing beyond veneers and false perceptions that mark conventional art and thinking. These works, in their simplicity, rawness, and honesty, employ an economy of means to express what is eternal, and in the process, become illuminated.

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