To arrive at the gallery before everyone is to be shocked by space. The lights are harsh. Whatever small sound is amplified, the reverb grave like an imploring hand. The past and present as potential at the same time and in situ.

But there are oases of warmth in the tableaus about. Worn browns. Glass with the smudges of handling. The paint may peel, but it aspires. In In Search of Lost Time, the pieces are separate but unified. One gravitates to each other as one does to an embrace.

Which is just as well. The instigator is one Norberto Roldan, Peewee to everyone who isn’t an official document; the slender man with the warm smile, whose handshake is at once acceptance and assault.

“With apologies to Marcel Proust” is Peewee’s refrain for this, his latest solo. Proust, that child of upheaval, born as he was just as the French government cracked down on the radical and socialist Paris Commune. Asthmatic and sickly, the novelist was a slacker by that day’s standards. He denied his homosexuality despite documentation to the contrary. His most famous work is a heptalogy about lost time and lack of meaning; not many have read it. “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them,” Proust had once written, echoing the heptalogy’s theme.

A theme shared by this collection of Peewee’s, himself a child of upheaval. After nearly a decade in the seminary, the younger Roldan had moved to advertising and finally to a slow, political awakening after migrating to Negros as a new family man. There, he unionized the very people working for him as tenants, and witnessed as an activist the death throes of a dictatorship before moving to Australia, where he would finally find his calling as a visual artist.

The gallery begins to fill up. The deviant reverb finally compresses. Chatter builds; as small as the art circle is, friends run into each other without previous plans. They are seeing each other for the first time in months, maybe years. Listen: stories of past and present suck them in, time is interstitial, and there’s the theme right there!

For in In Search of Lost Time (with apologies to Marcel Proust), recollections rise unbidden—from fragments or from a previous memory, thoughts building their own awesome, formidable momentum. An old powder case sends jolts straight to the ganglia that control memory and perception: one doesn’t see it so much as smell it. The sepia photos are so worn with viewing that the images in them can’t help moving. And is that a hair clip or a sex toy?

There continues previous transmutations of secular memorabilia into religious iconography. Found objects co-mingle with artifacts of nostalgia to form pedestals of / to memory, blurring the line between retablo (which is beyond reach and therefore aspirational) and àltar (which is ground-level and therefore performative).

Thus the assemblages and installations swing to the political, and thus subversive. Discrepancies figure in the theme as well then, particularly in the milieu we find ourselves in. For if the namesake heptalogy is about the decline of the aristocracy, then this spiritual successor on the other hand sits right smack on the path of a raging one, a loud thing engorged and flailing. Listen: one can hear it approach.

Proust once also wrote, “We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.” Hip to just that is Peewee, the man with the golden smile and the molten handshake. About In Search of Lost Time (with apologies to Marcel Proust), it is tempting to employ the image of a hall of mirrors, but it deserves nothing so overreaching. Instead, this:

To arrive at a train station with everyone is to be shocked by pressure. The lights are muffled. Whatever space on the platform is scrunched and the loneliness (despite the press) lewd like a groping hand. The past and present as realized, at the same time and in situ.

‍