The Absence of a Plan Is Itself a Plan
Various Artists
Raena Abella, Juan Alcazaren, Louie Cordero, Pardo de Leon, Rock Drilon, Jonathan Olazo, Mawen Ong, Elaine Roberto-Navas, Juni Salvador, Soler Santos, Gerardo Tan, Oca Villamiel, MM Yu
Raena Abella, Juan Alcazaren, Louie Cordero, Pardo de Leon, Rock Drilon, Jonathan Olazo, Mawen Ong, Elaine Roberto-Navas, Juni Salvador, Soler Santos, Gerardo Tan, Oca Villamiel, MM Yu
16 June – 15 July 2018
Curated by
Nilo Ilarde
16 June – 15 July 2018
A selection of paintings and objects offer a viable thesis in the contingent exhibition The Absence of a Plan is Itself a Plan. Entrusted with completing a reasonable selection, curator Nilo Ilarde espoused a criterion that sought to raise the bar of artistic conventions. The exhibition title is a brain teaser—is it a fortune cookie haiku or a John Lennon lyric? In this coup of verbal text, Ilarde recalls the stalwart positions taken by the Dadaists of long past and has laid the underbelly of conceptual linings that underpin every cloud of experimental practices. A few talking points are listed herewith.
Figurative painting persists as a vehicle of shock. In Louie Cordero’s work, the head of a man is comically mutated. Cordero is the conjurer and court jester, and his insistent glorification of relative abjectness allows him to slide to and fro the realms of the high and the low. Elaine Roberto-Navas’ expressively gestural depiction of a subject calls to mind the automatic drawings of the surrealist and Dada periods, a method that supposedly provides a portal to depict the subconscious. Yet, ultimately, the artist is a natural draftswoman and easily manages the masculine materiality of painting mediums and mesmerizes the onlooker.
Abstraction is the subject of inquiry in the works of Gerardo Tan, MM Yu, and Rock Drilon. Tan’s row of plank paintings attempts to hybridize the art form. Hanged on hinges that are attached to painting canvases that are, in turn, mounted on the wall, the said work resists classification. Is it a flat painting? Regardless, its premise is a beautifully unstable and conceptual one. Yu’s abstract paintings are constructed by allowing drips of paint to roll onto the painting’s surface until coagulation happens. Layers of drips are poured ritualistically one unit at a time. The self-imposed process is monastic and spiritual. One of the most accomplished artists who has gone under Jose Joya’s tutelage, Drilon superimposes gestural marks many times over till equilibrium is achieved. The artist’s working process emphasizes the proposed autonomy of painting—a painting is a product of its own making, of its own layered history. There is no referenced image outside of it.
The use of found objects figures prominently. Jonathan Olazo uses objects in forming visual pictograms that allude to the artist’s private musings. Oca Villamiel, in his included work, utilizes the political and advocacy aspect of collected and contained objects consisting of trace materials that were once-living creatures. Juan Alcazaren transforms discarded plastic parts into mesmerizing, asymmetrical compositions that play on the discretion of language and image.
Photography abides as the medium of choice for the avant-garde. In exploring closed, binary themes, Mawen Ong opted to capture the blank image reflected by a mirror with an off-the-shelf store scanner (a large camera lens, of sorts). Ong reconsiders conventional means to make a photographic image, and in a clever stroke, addresses the philosophical anxieties that have troubled the modern artist. Raena Abella uses images to chronicle events in her immediate sphere. In her work, she mystifies her persona by choosing a varied array of photographed objects that appear to have private meanings. The mysterious mood of her works is enhanced further by her use of the collodion process, an archaic technique that allows images to be etched on glass using a mixture of chemicals.
Soler Santos and Pardo de Leon use photographs as visual tools in constructing an image that is constituted in their paintings. Santos’ oeuvre has long included hyper-realistic renditions of tree roots, and composes these alongside other non-related images in an abstract composition. Pardo de Leon makes full use of photographs she takes in documenting her travels. Perhaps seeking solace in natural earth formations such as caves and ridges, she abstracts her pictures of these by cropping and then blows up to scale the edited image with a very discerning and painterly technique. In both cases, there is a felt move to personalize the photograph, and thus, there is worth in saying an image still bears the burden of mediating the individual to the subliminal world.
A few more bites at the meat and bone are in order. A fortuitously scheduled exhibition of this kind requires the guile of an outstanding curator. The designated person is both connoisseur and designer, and ultimately an arbiter and mediator of ideas that are offered upon opportunity in a given space such as a gallery. An incidental subplot and framework that make the proceedings a bit easier to decode are attributed to the influential theorist Nicolas Bourriaud (here’s to hoping the great theorist will not mind the quotation). A theory of his in the new era posits the exhibition space is a site for transactions. The varied exchanges involve not just monetary values for objects but allow for an invaluable exchange of ideas and learning.
It is safe to say what has transpired and arbitrated here not only titillates the eyes with visual candies but hits home a bit deeper. There is a sense of déjà vu in the present encounter with artistic puzzles and conundrums inhabiting each work. In some pocket communities, its rule remains transformed by this new ideal and continue as safe places. It has been almost a hundred years since the first found object came into being and jarred the wits out of the sleeping giant. But there always looms criminal pockets that reproduce and threaten to overturn the work of the former revolution and its glories.
In addressing the vanguard of today, a dominant framework attributed to the aforementioned theorist sounds excellent. In a paraphrase, art practitioners of today move in a state of re-modernity. Strategies and language games are inherited from the victories of the old regime. Perhaps its genealogy is blended to fortify new strains, but it remains to hold at bay the work of the insincere that threatens to corrupt every good deed and intention. Of this kind, too, serves as a sacrificial decoy for the sleepers to awaken in the next generation.
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About the Artist
About the Artists
Raena Abella is an artist who is currently focused on a series ranging from landscapes to the human form, and is pushing the boundaries of her art through alternative photographic processes, such as the wet-collodion process. Her work as an operations manager for a construction company and her training as a diesel engine mechanic also inform her unique artistic vision and narratives. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Artinformal, Blanc Gallery, West Gallery, Finale Art File, and Underground gallery to name some. Artinformal also presented her works during ALT Philippines 2020.
Juan Alcazaren (b. 1960) is a sculptor, bricoleur, collagist and object maker who works with a wide variety of materials ranging from construction steel to industrial and household detritus to ubiquitous everyday things like plastic monoblock chairs, school supply materials and melaware plates. Everything is material to him. In the 90’s he learned steel welding from Napoleon Abueva, CCP National Artist for Sculpture and has since always come back to this medium attracted by the way steel only “knows” how it wants to be formed. He always maintains a patina of rust on his steel pieces to show earthly life’s steady march towards death.
He tries to coax profundity out the ephemeral and overlooked in the world of the permanent and covetable. Alcazaren’s faith informed sensibilities make him see humble material as a metaphor for our own material nature, being creatures created by the Uncreated one. Juan Alcazaren has a bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture and studied sculpture the University of the Philippines where he also was a lecturer in 1995 at the College of Fine Arts. He was conferred the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 2000. He lives and works in Pasig City, Philippines and continues to actively exhibit in major galleries and art fairs in his home country and around the region.
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.
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.
Rock Drilon (b. 1956, Iloilo) graduated at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Diliman with a degree in Fine Arts. He does not only paint and work in the visual arts but also in the performing arts since 1982. Drilon has received numerous awards as early as a student in Elementary and High School. As an artist, he received awards in Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Painting Competitions in late 1970s and has led many local art organizations and projects including the AAP (1990–91), Dumangas Projects (1991–93), Mag:net Galleries (2000–2010), and VIVA ExCon Iloilo (2016). His works have been reviewed / criticized by acclaimed art critics and international art reviewers such as Alice Guillermo (1981), Ninotchka Rosca (1990), and Rachel Mayo (1992). Drilon had started doing solo exhibitions in 1976 and group exhibitions at 1975. He has exhibited at Gallery Feldmann, Switzerland, Museo Iloilo, Ayala Museum, Philippine Center Gallery, USA, and West Gallery to name some.
Jonathan Olazo (b. 1969, Manila) graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine Arts, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, where he now teaches. He is a recipient of the Grand Prize from the Philippine Association of Printmakers Open Graphic Arts Competition and Exhibition (1987), the Thirteen Artists Awards by the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1994), the Voted Artist of the Year with Roy Halili for Art Manila Newspaper Art Awards (2003), and an artist residency in Fukuoka, Japan by an independent curator, Mizuki Endo (2004). Olazo has had solo and group exhibitions both in local and international spaces, including the Tetra Art Space, Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur, Manila Contemporary, Now Gallery, the Vargas Museum at UP, the Drawing Room, and Paseo Gallery.
Mawen Ong (b. 1964) is an artist and gallery director in Manila. She is a member of King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, an initiative dedicated to archiving and preserving the works of Roberto Chabet. She obtained 2 business degrees at St. Scholastica’s College and eventually studied Painting at the University of the Philippines - College of Fine Arts. She has been exhibiting since 2005 in both solo and group exhibitions at Future Prospects, Green Papaya Art Projects, West Gallery, Osage Gallery Hong Kong, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Blanc Gallery, and Silverlens Manila, among others.
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.
Juni Salvador (b. 1962) is a Filipino artist based in Sydney, Australia. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising from the Philippine Women’s University College of Fine Arts. He taught at Maria Montessori Children’s School and at International School-Manila. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various galleries including the Institute of Contemporary Art, La Salle Singapore, Manila Contemporary, SLOT space in Sydney, Mag:net Gallery, the Yuchengco Museum, Finale Art File, and West Gallery.
Soler Santos (b. 1960) attended the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine Arts from 1978-82. He is a painter and photographer. Santos founded West Gallery with his wife and fellow artist, Mona Santos, in 1989.
Santos has represented the Philippines in international events such as the 1st ASEAN Youth Painting and Workshop in Thailand (1983), the 2nd Asian Art Show in Japan (1985), and the 11th International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2004). He is the recipient of the First Prize from the ASEAN Painting Competition (1983) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (1992).
Santos has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at spaces including the Luz Gallery, Blanc Gallery, Silverlens Galleries, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Artinformal, the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the ICA La Salle College of the Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
Gerardo Tan (b. 1960) works across various media from painting, collage, artist books to video, found objects, and installation to deal with conceptual plays and issues of representation. He recreates images culled from the world of art and mass media in order to subvert hierarchies and give way to new itinerant meanings.
Tan took his BFA at the University of the Philippines and his MFA at the State University of New York in Buffalo, USA. He has participated in several international exhibitions including Pause (4th Gwangju Biennial, 2002), Signs of Life (First Melbourne Biennial, 1999), The 3rd Asian Art Biennial Bangladesh (Osmani Memorial Hall, Dhaka, 1986), and The 2nd Asian Art Show (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1982). His recent solo exhibitions are Points of Departure (Noestudio, 2013 Madrid, Spain), Hablon Redux and Other Transcriptions (Random Parts, Oakland, USA, 2016) and Visualizing Sound (Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Philippines, 2019).
He was conferred the 13 Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1988. His other distinctions include the Fulbright-Hays Grant at SUNY Buffalo (1990-92), the Barbara Schuller’s Art Associates Award in Buffalo, NY (1992) and the Juror’s Choice at the Art Association of the Philippines Annual Competition in 1997.
Oscar Villamiel (b. 1953) studied Fine Arts at the University of the East (UE). He is a multi-media artist who produces large scale installation works through the collation and collecting of found materials from urban and rural environments. Villamiel has worked as a set designer and entrepreneur the past two decades and went back to his first vocation as a studio artist in 2006, starting with group exhibitions.
Villamiel held his first one-man exhibition, a large-scale installation titled Wounded Spirit, in 2009 at the Art Center of SM Megamall in Mandaluyong, featuring large-scale multimedia paintings. His second solo show, Mourning Glory, was held at the Crucible Gallery in 2010, while his third solo show, titled Stories of our Time, was organized at Light and Space Contemporary in 2012.
Villamiel’s large-scale installation, titled “Payatas,” was exhibited as part of the Singapore Biennale exhibition, If the World Changed (2013) at the Singapore Art Museum. He continued to produce installation works for his solo exhibitions in 2014 at the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum and Light & Space Contemporary, in Quezon City. Villamiel currently lives and works in Marikina City.
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
Raena Abella is an artist who is currently focused on a series ranging from landscapes to the human form, and is pushing the boundaries of her art through alternative photographic processes, such as the wet-collodion process. Her work as an operations manager for a construction company and her training as a diesel engine mechanic also inform her unique artistic vision and narratives. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Artinformal, Blanc Gallery, West Gallery, Finale Art File, and Underground gallery to name some. Artinformal also presented her works during ALT Philippines 2020.
Juan Alcazaren (b. 1960) is a sculptor, bricoleur, collagist and object maker who works with a wide variety of materials ranging from construction steel to industrial and household detritus to ubiquitous everyday things like plastic monoblock chairs, school supply materials and melaware plates. Everything is material to him. In the 90’s he learned steel welding from Napoleon Abueva, CCP National Artist for Sculpture and has since always come back to this medium attracted by the way steel only “knows” how it wants to be formed. He always maintains a patina of rust on his steel pieces to show earthly life’s steady march towards death.
He tries to coax profundity out the ephemeral and overlooked in the world of the permanent and covetable. Alcazaren’s faith informed sensibilities make him see humble material as a metaphor for our own material nature, being creatures created by the Uncreated one. Juan Alcazaren has a bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture and studied sculpture the University of the Philippines where he also was a lecturer in 1995 at the College of Fine Arts. He was conferred the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 2000. He lives and works in Pasig City, Philippines and continues to actively exhibit in major galleries and art fairs in his home country and around the region.
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.
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.
Rock Drilon (b. 1956, Iloilo) graduated at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Diliman with a degree in Fine Arts. He does not only paint and work in the visual arts but also in the performing arts since 1982. Drilon has received numerous awards as early as a student in Elementary and High School. As an artist, he received awards in Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Painting Competitions in late 1970s and has led many local art organizations and projects including the AAP (1990–91), Dumangas Projects (1991–93), Mag:net Galleries (2000–2010), and VIVA ExCon Iloilo (2016). His works have been reviewed / criticized by acclaimed art critics and international art reviewers such as Alice Guillermo (1981), Ninotchka Rosca (1990), and Rachel Mayo (1992). Drilon had started doing solo exhibitions in 1976 and group exhibitions at 1975. He has exhibited at Gallery Feldmann, Switzerland, Museo Iloilo, Ayala Museum, Philippine Center Gallery, USA, and West Gallery to name some.
Jonathan Olazo (b. 1969, Manila) graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine Arts, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, where he now teaches. He is a recipient of the Grand Prize from the Philippine Association of Printmakers Open Graphic Arts Competition and Exhibition (1987), the Thirteen Artists Awards by the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1994), the Voted Artist of the Year with Roy Halili for Art Manila Newspaper Art Awards (2003), and an artist residency in Fukuoka, Japan by an independent curator, Mizuki Endo (2004). Olazo has had solo and group exhibitions both in local and international spaces, including the Tetra Art Space, Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur, Manila Contemporary, Now Gallery, the Vargas Museum at UP, the Drawing Room, and Paseo Gallery.
Mawen Ong (b. 1964) is an artist and gallery director in Manila. She is a member of King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, an initiative dedicated to archiving and preserving the works of Roberto Chabet. She obtained 2 business degrees at St. Scholastica’s College and eventually studied Painting at the University of the Philippines - College of Fine Arts. She has been exhibiting since 2005 in both solo and group exhibitions at Future Prospects, Green Papaya Art Projects, West Gallery, Osage Gallery Hong Kong, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Blanc Gallery, and Silverlens Manila, among others.
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.
Juni Salvador (b. 1962) is a Filipino artist based in Sydney, Australia. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising from the Philippine Women’s University College of Fine Arts. He taught at Maria Montessori Children’s School and at International School-Manila. He has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at various galleries including the Institute of Contemporary Art, La Salle Singapore, Manila Contemporary, SLOT space in Sydney, Mag:net Gallery, the Yuchengco Museum, Finale Art File, and West Gallery.
Soler Santos (b. 1960) attended the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine Arts from 1978-82. He is a painter and photographer. Santos founded West Gallery with his wife and fellow artist, Mona Santos, in 1989.
Santos has represented the Philippines in international events such as the 1st ASEAN Youth Painting and Workshop in Thailand (1983), the 2nd Asian Art Show in Japan (1985), and the 11th International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2004). He is the recipient of the First Prize from the ASEAN Painting Competition (1983) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (1992).
Santos has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at spaces including the Luz Gallery, Blanc Gallery, Silverlens Galleries, Finale Art File, MO_Space, Artinformal, the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the ICA La Salle College of the Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
Gerardo Tan (b. 1960) works across various media from painting, collage, artist books to video, found objects, and installation to deal with conceptual plays and issues of representation. He recreates images culled from the world of art and mass media in order to subvert hierarchies and give way to new itinerant meanings.
Tan took his BFA at the University of the Philippines and his MFA at the State University of New York in Buffalo, USA. He has participated in several international exhibitions including Pause (4th Gwangju Biennial, 2002), Signs of Life (First Melbourne Biennial, 1999), The 3rd Asian Art Biennial Bangladesh (Osmani Memorial Hall, Dhaka, 1986), and The 2nd Asian Art Show (Fukuoka Art Museum, 1982). His recent solo exhibitions are Points of Departure (Noestudio, 2013 Madrid, Spain), Hablon Redux and Other Transcriptions (Random Parts, Oakland, USA, 2016) and Visualizing Sound (Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Philippines, 2019).
He was conferred the 13 Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1988. His other distinctions include the Fulbright-Hays Grant at SUNY Buffalo (1990-92), the Barbara Schuller’s Art Associates Award in Buffalo, NY (1992) and the Juror’s Choice at the Art Association of the Philippines Annual Competition in 1997.
Oscar Villamiel (b. 1953) studied Fine Arts at the University of the East (UE). He is a multi-media artist who produces large scale installation works through the collation and collecting of found materials from urban and rural environments. Villamiel has worked as a set designer and entrepreneur the past two decades and went back to his first vocation as a studio artist in 2006, starting with group exhibitions.
Villamiel held his first one-man exhibition, a large-scale installation titled Wounded Spirit, in 2009 at the Art Center of SM Megamall in Mandaluyong, featuring large-scale multimedia paintings. His second solo show, Mourning Glory, was held at the Crucible Gallery in 2010, while his third solo show, titled Stories of our Time, was organized at Light and Space Contemporary in 2012.
Villamiel’s large-scale installation, titled “Payatas,” was exhibited as part of the Singapore Biennale exhibition, If the World Changed (2013) at the Singapore Art Museum. He continued to produce installation works for his solo exhibitions in 2014 at the University of the Philippines Vargas Museum and Light & Space Contemporary, in Quezon City. Villamiel currently lives and works in Marikina City.
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).
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