Objects—like paint, when applied with meticulous rendering in a formalized space like a white gallery cube or an empty canvas—transcend themselves to be subjects. Such careful valuation and reflexivity are the thoughts that come to mind when an artist like Lubin Nepomuceno gives the viewer an opportunity to observe the qualities involved in art production.

Elements like texture, space, shape, color, tone / value, and line are qualities that have fulfilled the usual syntax of art-making. A few artists step out of it, while most treat these same elements as valuable codes of art production. While the elements usually reinforce one another, there can also exist contrasting or contradictory relationships, which may be part of the meaning of a work. The elements and all material features are thus to be viewed in a highly relational manner and not isolated and compartmentalized.

For someone like Lubin Nepomuceno working as a sculptor and painter, space and dimension reflect a puritan ethic. The essential investigation of his paintings drives us to see the tactical approaches to the materiality of the work as, still, an aspect of space. His paintings delineate the visual and two-dimensional elements of space, while his installations provided a place in which to “experience” space. Although beset with doubts as to the specificity of the two media, sculpture and painting, Nepomuceno considers them as one and the same. Nepomuceno creates his own syntax, and while it is highly regarded that matter or material should not be isolated or compartmentalized, it would seem that to him, it mayor may not matter. 

Nepomuceno utilizes the techniques of collage, impasto, cut-and-paste, sewing-machine stitching, and paper-folding, creating the same effect in various techniques and formats within the production and imitation of image-making, like a post-punk craftsman. Added to the process are images which somehow provide the same basic, elemental information such as the numbers zero to nine, the letters A–Z, the formation of his art education through art history, forgery, or kinships on the internet—forming myths, histories, and ideas constantly in the level of birthing and reproducing.

What sets him apart from the usual agenda of the art world in Manila is his departure from it, which is never tainted by the struggle for class or culture that predominates the globalized market. Perhaps his devotion to domesticity and play has given him an ongoing perspective in looking at artwork and art production in the same vein: a careful regard to instinct / logic where objects and subjects forge identical relationships, and a sense of time that is multilinear, connected by points of self-taught, formulaic forces producing immaculate possibilities.

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