‍‍Art and science.

Whatever schisms these two disciplines form are inevitably and eventually lost to Ronald Achacoso. Having long toed the line between both, aesthetically and philosophically, there is no schism as far as he’s concerned. There never was. And any bleed, any overlap, between the two is organic as it should be. Go back to his body of work knowing this, and it sharpens into relief how they’re ostensibly taken up, albeit in varying degrees, with the teasing of parallels that run between the seemingly diametric processes of art and science, the impulses that actually feed off each other more profusely than you think—naming and un-naming, containment and loosing, concealment and unearthing, investigation and mystery, exploration and discovery.

Achacoso has elaborated previously on the confluence of map making and painting how they both transpose a matter of form and representation on flat surfaces, how they stem from the primal urge to mark territories, and how the artist is both explorer and cartographer, venturing into the virtual topographies of his subconscious, plotting and charting this amorphous and mutable territory.

The dense topographic surfaces of his painting, built up from the sometimes random, sometimes methodical, painting and erasing and painting over of images, do have a literal sense of terrain. Crusted and ridged and cratered, they exude an overt geological presence—the way they’re richly layered as if like strata, but also emit this primeval glow—the way they’re richly layered as if like metaphor. Paint as image, image as paint. Paint and image as metaphor. Science as a means of entering the realms of memory and dream. Science as a mother lode for a new mythology.

Abstraction of Beasts resumes this immutable synergy between process and product. The show title is from a chapter of Dragons of Eden—Carl Sagan’s epistle to the evolution of, among other things, man’s capacity for abstract thinking—whose influence throbs under the skin of the work. The abstraction here is literal to a certain degree, but it’s also evasive and open-ended as the deliberately misappropriated title also alludes to the Fauvist notion of the artist as a wild beast, as a primitive grappling to understand through the limits of his language.

The images, culled as they are from scientific journals, are familiar but muted and nameless to the point of being emblematic, that it obscures whatever recognition and empathy you might have had. If taxonomy, that is, the science of designating a name for a systematic classification and ordering of an organism, bequeaths what was previously mysterious with a shape to grasp, seeking to contain what was uncontained, then the making of art, in this instance, is like its mirror twin: seeking instead to loose, to unleash the fettered, and to restore the mystery.

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