MO_Space is proud to present Joebau’s solo exhibit titled Throw Hide & Twist. The exhibit experiments with the boundaries of painting, performance, mixed media, and sculptural installation, while exploring conceptual meaning and its signs, the application of design and Pop into abstraction, process and gesture, and social commentary. Joebau’s work essentially involves a rethinking of artistic practice, focusing on process with a critical inquiry on quotidian details that reflect and illuminate social reality. He established himself in the 70’s with his conceptual sculptures that became a form of institutional critique during its time, particularly catching controversial attention for “Bubong,” an installation of rusting corrugated GI sheets that resembled squalid conditions pervading the city, seen in the exhibit 5 Contemporary Sculptors at the CCP Main Gallery in 1979. For Throw Hide & Twist, Joebau introduces us to a philosophical inquiry that stretches across time, gesture, and event, ostensibly covering our concerns today about isolation, distance, experience, and response through an economy of means expanded only by aesthetic imagination.

Largely tectonic in their encompassing gestures positioned across the picture surface, the implied physicality in Joebau’s series of paintings called “Hide on Board” reverberates with primal energy that echoes geologic time like eruptions marking crucial events. Reduced to an essential state of blackened imprints whose form and texture picture nature’s sublime ineffability, they distinguish the transcendent realizations of abstract expressionism from the destiny of minimalist entropy, of an existential design determined by action, process, and ultimately, by its own being. Such visual paradox would point towards conceptual rigors, which produce a unique trace of aesthetic awareness questioning the work’s material constitution, surface and structure, formal values, and beyond the limits of representation, in ways to develop stylistic strategies defying accepted norms. Joebau would turn to gestalt combinations of collage to break compositional formulae, toying with the graphic qualities of Pop, as well as intimating cinematic montage, or the electronic pastiche of cut and paste.

Indeed, Joebau’s concerns with aesthetic dematerialization would necessitate a critique on the object’s status as commodity and its social representation. Thus, more conceptually realized projects within the current exhibit continue Joebau’s investigations of art’s prowess to prod critical awareness through unusual means that end up beautiful if not accordingly with intellectual pleasure.

With the title of “Hide on Wood” and comprising of painted wood and clear plastic bag, this composition brings to mind the current horror of the worldwide pandemic through an anthropomorphic portrayal with precise visual economy. “Twist”, another pervasive void in space broken only by the interactive manipulations of a meter stick, is reimagined here like the dance effects of the stock market in play that remain abstract to the many. Its current iteration within the series “Twist Again” adds a playful anthropomorphism to his approach that straddle the lines of action painting and Pop, culminating into a charming visage formed from various steps, probing and pivotal through their mark-making, and providing a recognizable and undeniable presence to an otherwise abstract moment. The series “Hide and Twist” is remarkably figurative, layered with psychological tics inflected with humor characterized by the twists of its prosthesis, which can reveal hidden truths.

Using essentially everyday materials of flour and gauze cheesecloth, “Throw Me” calls for a space of its own to define causality, as when concealed dynamics culminate to being. “Throw Me” utilizes performance, on-site installation, and video, which documents the artist throwing the cheesecloth with flour at the blackened walls.  With each impact leaving traces on the wall, white marks accumulate like spots on its surface. The piece blurs the distinction of painting with mark-making, performance in throwing and endurance, sculptural installation in the residual process, and reflecting on the concept of time and effect, of presence and absence. “Throw Me” is thus a sublime catharsis in visual relief.

Joebau’s brilliant Throw Hide & Twist at MO_Space is a sustained investigation of artistic substance in relation to the social and subjective spheres that elude conventional representation and towards conceptual breakthroughs.