Objects, Paintings, Sculptures 2
Various Artists
Gino Bueza, Mariano Ching, Louie Cordero, Gale Encarnacion, Pardo de Leon, Elaine Roberto-Navas, MM Yu
Gino Bueza, Mariano Ching, Louie Cordero, Gale Encarnacion, Pardo de Leon, Elaine Roberto-Navas, MM Yu
16 – 19 February 2017
Curated by
16 – 19 February 2017
Objects, Paintings, Sculptures 2 celebrates the tactility and presence of artworks. Paint and canvas, resin and wood become things in themselves, stirring memories of Heidegger’s The Thing, where he asked: “What in the thing is thingly? What is the thing in itself? We shall not reach the thing in itself until our thinking has reached the thing as a thing.” Here, too, are echoes of Bill Brown’s Thing Theory: “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”
MO_Space showed the first iteration of Objects, Paintings, Sculptures in the 2016 edition of Art Fair Philippines. The exhibition included wall works, objects that blurred the line between painting and sculpture, and works that used the table itself—a repeating motif of the gallery’s booth since the fair’s inception—as a subject instead of furniture. The gallery follows up on the “thingness of things” with Objects, Paintings, Sculptures 2 and beseeches us, beyond its philosophical implications, to enjoy art for its materiality.
Elaine Roberto-Navas’ paintings of teddy bears, based on photographs she took at the Singapore Mint Museum of Toys, harks back to her first solo show in 1994 and to her early dalliances with the plasticity of paint. Regardless of subject, Navas’ work bears (pardon the pun) her signature impasto. Daubs of pigment, smeared and swirling, create an illusion of solidity. Up close, the pigment itself gains a sculptural aspect. These teddy bear portraits, considered in tandem with MM Yu’s non-representational drip-and-blob paintings, teach us to apprehend paint as matter—its mass and how it occupies space, its subservience to the tyranny of gravity (as all objects must obey the laws of physics).
Where Roberto-Navas and Yu focus our attention on paint, Pardo de Leon shifts the conversation to the canvas itself. “Measure the Distance to the Heavens by the Depth of the Fall” is a three-piece work depicting the sky and its reflection on the salt flats of Salar de Uyuni, which de Leon visited in 1996. It is, however, the frame—the form of, and made by, the canvas—that calls for more scrutiny. Modeled after an altarpiece commissioned by the Florentine Palla Strozzi for his burial chapel in the church of Santa Trinita, Florence, the wall work revisits de Leon’s series of shaped paintings which she began in the 1980s. Now, as in then, de Leon’s shaped painting is an investigation of negative space and how it can command as much attention as the painted subject.
Meanwhile, contributions by Louie Cordero and Gino Bueza straddle the line between painting and sculpture. Bueza presents panels made from paint and glue molded on ice trays, which, when viewed from a distance, mimic discrete pixels that make up raster images in the digital world. Where Bueza’s work is an orderly grid, Cordero’s is a resin tapestry made from 31 individual, googly-eyeds quiggles. Cordero references Italian architect Ettore Sottsass, the founder of the Memphis Group of design known for “trawling history for allusions and splattering them with previously unthinkable patterns.” (McGuirk, 2011) By using a Carrara marble-like finish, Cordero also winks at a precious material beloved by Italian Renaissance sculptors.
The wall works in Objects, Paintings, Sculptures 2 are complemented by tabletop pieces from Gale Encarnacion and Mariano Ching. Encarnacion’s “Confections” is a feast of human anatomy displayed in glass cloches and bell jars. Sculpted from bubblegum, fleshy pink organs are served up on dinner plates. Presented in this context, objects that rouse disgust become delectable. What consumes (teeth, tongue) becomes consumable.
Ching’s mobile series, inspired by a photograph of a tent atop a car, is premised on making sculptural forms from easy-to-find materials. He uses glue, paper, and popsicle sticks—the earliest tools of creative expression used by schoolchildren, apart from pencils and crayons—to develop an idea he first broached in 2011 with a pair of exhibitions based on architectural structures. Cobbled together from the mundane, these organic and abstract forms bring us back full circle to Heidegger’s thing / object dichotomy: Objects, Paintings, Sculptures 2 is a gathering of “things, each thinging and each staying in its own way.”
About the Artist
About the Artists
Gino Bueza (b. 1987, Binangonan, Rizal) graduated with a degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. He is a recipient of the Grand Prize from the 40th Shell Students’ Art Competition (Oil/Acrylic category), and an artist residency at Light and Space Contemporary (2012–2013). He is also a finalist Tanaw: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Painting Competition (2011), and Shell Art Competition (2005, 2006). In 2017, Bueza has been shortlisted at the Ateneo Art Awards for his exhibition at West Gallery, Systems of Control. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at Blanc Gallery, TAKSU Singapore, Finale Art File, West Gallery, Artinformal, and Light and Space Contemporary.
Mariano Ching (b. 1971) graduated from the Fine Arts Program of University of the Philippines (UP) and studied at the Kyoto Arts University, Japan as a Research Student, Major in Printmaking. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and institutions worldwide, such as the Singapore Art Museum, Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur, Art Taipei, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Owen James Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, the Voice Gallery, Kyoto, Silverlens Manila and Singapore, as well as Finale Art File, among others.
Painter and sculptor Louie Cordero began an active exhibiting career while pursuing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. After graduating in 2001, he became a core member of the painting collective Surrounded by Water and artist-in-residence with the artist-run initiative Big Sky Mind. His work explored imagery and narratives at the nexus of Philippine Catholicism, politics, mass culture, mining the collective consciousness of the Pinoy everyman with a humorous edge. He won the Grand Prize (Painting), 8th Annual Freeman Foundation Vermont Studio Centre in 2002-3. In 2005, he co-founded Future Prospects alternative art space. He is the creator of Nardong Tae, the underground comics of cult status in the Philippines.
Fascinated with kitschy outsider aesthetics and colonial-era leftovers, acrylic has become Cordero's medium of choice in painting since 2005 as he turned towards the super-flat aesthetics of spray-painted Philippine jeepneys and other waning commercial art forms. He received the Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards in 2006 and earlier. Solo exhibitions overseas include DELUBYO (Giant Robot, Los Angeles, 2008), Actuality/Virtuality (3 Sogoku Warehouse, Fukuoka, 2003), Soft Death (Osage, Hong Kong and Singapore, 2009) and Sacred Bones (Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York, 2010). The recent years display an intensity in the bricolage-method of image construction that takes us through a thrill ride through unbridled imaginations and rerouted libidos, coupled with awkward rendering and visionary courage. His work has been included in World of Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia, 2008; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai, Eslite Gallery, Taipei, 2008; Singapore Biennale 2011; the 14th Jakarta Biennale, 2011; and PANORAMA, Singapore Art Museum, 2012.
Cordero’s puzzling, imploring, and visually striking juxtapositions are often punctuated by blood and gore, as if to imply the history of violence and bloodshed that his nation and people have sustained. Cordero’s artwork makes references to his native Philippines, a nation rich with diversity—the result of multiple changes in political regime and subjugation throughout its history. With a complex mixture of eastern and western influences, the cultural fabric of The Republic of The Philippines is a unique combination of ethnic heritage and traditions, composed of indigenous folklore, Asian customs and Spanish legacy reflective in the names and religion.
Figures from Filipino mythology and its strong oral tradition are referenced through the artist’s gruesome monsters and zombies, while another source of inspiration derived from his nationality involves the Jeepney (U.S. military vehicles abandoned after WWII, and converted by locals to use as public transportation). Each Jeepney, unique and elaborately decorated in vibrant colors, features an ornate mash-up of pop and religious iconography. By combining these elements, varied and obscure (to Westerners), with imagery appropriated from Cordero’s assorted interests including kitsch, Indian advertising, cult American b-movies, and pulp horror, the contrasting influences reflect the complex diversity of the artist’s heritage itself.
Gale Encarnacion’s work is characterized by a scathing awareness of impermanence. Her intermedia pieces call attention to the frailty of the human body, as she makes use of ubiquitous / ordinary materials such as bread, salt dough, and bubble gum. Gleaning themes and subject matter from the organic, the scientific, and the fleeting, she paints and sculpts biological entities—insects, body parts, roadkill—and uses them in narratives that outline the persistence of time. Her work is the result of a fascination with our flesh and breath and spit and the accompanying guarantee that eventually we all will be gone.
Pardo de Leon’s paintings are reminiscent of the style of the old European Masters, and she is known for her distinctive style of painting marked by a ‘sense of line, gesture, and touch.’ Belonging to a generation of painters whose works are mainly based on found photographic imagery, de Leon approaches painting both intuitively and methodically. Working adeptly in both abstraction and figuration, she confronts conventions in painting through the juxtaposition of images, the layering of different forms and motifs, or by zooming in on particular aspects and details of the subject.
Pardo de Leon graduated with a degree in Painting from the UP College of Fine Arts in 1987. She was a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1988. She also received a studio residency grant from the Italian-Swedish Cultural Foundation in Venice, Italy in 1999, which was awarded the best show of the year by the state council. De Leon has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and museums including the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Blanc Gallery, Manila Contemporary, Valentine Willie Fine Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art – La Salle College of the Arts. She currently lives and works in Baguio City.
It is with timelessness that Elaine Roberto-Navas (b. 1964) works her brush and palette over canvas. With subjects ranging from flowers to furniture, from the sky to water, she paints with oil in thick strokes; the object appears swathed in movement. Still life or landscape as they may be considered, they move with each glance, and if you stare, the motion starts to permeate outside the four corners of her paintings. What Roberto-Navas captures in her work is not merely an object in nature, but its spirit in movement, and together with her technique, artistry, and will, her paintings exist in a timelessness that might outlive us all, yet carry our humanity onwards.
Elaine Roberto-Navas graduated with BA in Psychology from Ateneo de Manila University (1985), and a Fine Arts degree, Major in Painting from the University of the Philippines (1991). Roberto-Navas has received various awards including the Jurors’ Choice Awards from the Art Association of the Philippines (1994, 1995), the Honorable Mention from the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards (1995), and the Honorable Mention from the Philip Morris Singapore Art Awards (2002). She has shown at the Ayala Museum, Silverlens Gallery, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Art Informal, West Gallery, UP Vargas Museum, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and Valentine Willie Fine Art in Singapore to name a few.
MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Gino Bueza (b. 1987, Binangonan, Rizal) graduated with a degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. He is a recipient of the Grand Prize from the 40th Shell Students’ Art Competition (Oil/Acrylic category), and an artist residency at Light and Space Contemporary (2012–2013). He is also a finalist Tanaw: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Painting Competition (2011), and Shell Art Competition (2005, 2006). In 2017, Bueza has been shortlisted at the Ateneo Art Awards for his exhibition at West Gallery, Systems of Control. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at Blanc Gallery, TAKSU Singapore, Finale Art File, West Gallery, Artinformal, and Light and Space Contemporary.
Mariano Ching (b. 1971) graduated from the Fine Arts Program of University of the Philippines (UP) and studied at the Kyoto Arts University, Japan as a Research Student, Major in Printmaking. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and institutions worldwide, such as the Singapore Art Museum, Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur, Art Taipei, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Owen James Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, the Voice Gallery, Kyoto, Silverlens Manila and Singapore, as well as Finale Art File, among others.
Painter and sculptor Louie Cordero began an active exhibiting career while pursuing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. After graduating in 2001, he became a core member of the painting collective Surrounded by Water and artist-in-residence with the artist-run initiative Big Sky Mind. His work explored imagery and narratives at the nexus of Philippine Catholicism, politics, mass culture, mining the collective consciousness of the Pinoy everyman with a humorous edge. He won the Grand Prize (Painting), 8th Annual Freeman Foundation Vermont Studio Centre in 2002-3. In 2005, he co-founded Future Prospects alternative art space. He is the creator of Nardong Tae, the underground comics of cult status in the Philippines.
Fascinated with kitschy outsider aesthetics and colonial-era leftovers, acrylic has become Cordero's medium of choice in painting since 2005 as he turned towards the super-flat aesthetics of spray-painted Philippine jeepneys and other waning commercial art forms. He received the Cultural Centre of the Philippines 13 Artists Awards in 2006 and earlier. Solo exhibitions overseas include DELUBYO (Giant Robot, Los Angeles, 2008), Actuality/Virtuality (3 Sogoku Warehouse, Fukuoka, 2003), Soft Death (Osage, Hong Kong and Singapore, 2009) and Sacred Bones (Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York, 2010). The recent years display an intensity in the bricolage-method of image construction that takes us through a thrill ride through unbridled imaginations and rerouted libidos, coupled with awkward rendering and visionary courage. His work has been included in World of Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia, 2008; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai, Eslite Gallery, Taipei, 2008; Singapore Biennale 2011; the 14th Jakarta Biennale, 2011; and PANORAMA, Singapore Art Museum, 2012.
Cordero’s puzzling, imploring, and visually striking juxtapositions are often punctuated by blood and gore, as if to imply the history of violence and bloodshed that his nation and people have sustained. Cordero’s artwork makes references to his native Philippines, a nation rich with diversity—the result of multiple changes in political regime and subjugation throughout its history. With a complex mixture of eastern and western influences, the cultural fabric of The Republic of The Philippines is a unique combination of ethnic heritage and traditions, composed of indigenous folklore, Asian customs and Spanish legacy reflective in the names and religion.
Figures from Filipino mythology and its strong oral tradition are referenced through the artist’s gruesome monsters and zombies, while another source of inspiration derived from his nationality involves the Jeepney (U.S. military vehicles abandoned after WWII, and converted by locals to use as public transportation). Each Jeepney, unique and elaborately decorated in vibrant colors, features an ornate mash-up of pop and religious iconography. By combining these elements, varied and obscure (to Westerners), with imagery appropriated from Cordero’s assorted interests including kitsch, Indian advertising, cult American b-movies, and pulp horror, the contrasting influences reflect the complex diversity of the artist’s heritage itself.
Gale Encarnacion’s work is characterized by a scathing awareness of impermanence. Her intermedia pieces call attention to the frailty of the human body, as she makes use of ubiquitous / ordinary materials such as bread, salt dough, and bubble gum. Gleaning themes and subject matter from the organic, the scientific, and the fleeting, she paints and sculpts biological entities—insects, body parts, roadkill—and uses them in narratives that outline the persistence of time. Her work is the result of a fascination with our flesh and breath and spit and the accompanying guarantee that eventually we all will be gone.
Pardo de Leon’s paintings are reminiscent of the style of the old European Masters, and she is known for her distinctive style of painting marked by a ‘sense of line, gesture, and touch.’ Belonging to a generation of painters whose works are mainly based on found photographic imagery, de Leon approaches painting both intuitively and methodically. Working adeptly in both abstraction and figuration, she confronts conventions in painting through the juxtaposition of images, the layering of different forms and motifs, or by zooming in on particular aspects and details of the subject.
Pardo de Leon graduated with a degree in Painting from the UP College of Fine Arts in 1987. She was a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1988. She also received a studio residency grant from the Italian-Swedish Cultural Foundation in Venice, Italy in 1999, which was awarded the best show of the year by the state council. De Leon has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and museums including the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Blanc Gallery, Manila Contemporary, Valentine Willie Fine Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art – La Salle College of the Arts. She currently lives and works in Baguio City.
It is with timelessness that Elaine Roberto-Navas (b. 1964) works her brush and palette over canvas. With subjects ranging from flowers to furniture, from the sky to water, she paints with oil in thick strokes; the object appears swathed in movement. Still life or landscape as they may be considered, they move with each glance, and if you stare, the motion starts to permeate outside the four corners of her paintings. What Roberto-Navas captures in her work is not merely an object in nature, but its spirit in movement, and together with her technique, artistry, and will, her paintings exist in a timelessness that might outlive us all, yet carry our humanity onwards.
Elaine Roberto-Navas graduated with BA in Psychology from Ateneo de Manila University (1985), and a Fine Arts degree, Major in Painting from the University of the Philippines (1991). Roberto-Navas has received various awards including the Jurors’ Choice Awards from the Art Association of the Philippines (1994, 1995), the Honorable Mention from the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards (1995), and the Honorable Mention from the Philip Morris Singapore Art Awards (2002). She has shown at the Ayala Museum, Silverlens Gallery, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Art Informal, West Gallery, UP Vargas Museum, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and Valentine Willie Fine Art in Singapore to name a few.
MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).
Related Exhibitions
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