At first blush, you get the sense that Cris Villanueva and Jojo Serrano are being more than a little flippant, cheeky even, with the title of their two-man show Almost Contrived. It’s easy as well to construe their admissions to contrivance as a variety of self-deprecation, which it isn’t. Villanueva and Serrano are far from being self-deprecating here. Contrivance was their original impetus, their chariot horse. What the title implies then, and what the work celebrates ultimately, is a disappointment of intent. Which is not to say the work fails, at least not in the traditional sense of failing, but rather it fails in the sense that it goes off script when the “script,” such as it were, is crucial to, if not entirely the core of, the work.

Villanueva and Serrano both use found images and photographs as base matter, guided in varying degrees by a collagist’s mien but given over to a very deliberate strategy to achieve a specific effect and indulging every measure in it.  

Of the two, Serrano’s work is not only the most overtly, even aggressively, collage-like in temperament. Serrano refers to his work here as being “built up” and there is perhaps no term more accurate to boil it down to. He begins by deliberately and painstakingly selecting images that he then composes on paper. Then he draws the finished collage on canvas. The last step is when he paints. Each stage involves a visceral physicality, a tactile rigor. This is eventually what gives it charge but also what unifies all three procedures.

The images Serrano uses are cut from magazines. On the other hand, Villanueva took nearly all the images he uses, which he then tweaks. “A Warm December” was originally a nondescript snapshot of a night in the red light district but for the bird on the shoulder of the lone male figure which he describes as having been “photoshopped,” which it technically wasn’t, but in many ways, aesthetically was. “Selected Phases of Flight (After Martin Heine),” for instance, is based on a photograph he took of what could well be Martin Heine’s last performance and is a work with an even more gleefully twisted paradox, being a copy of an artwork that really isn’t.

This is the contrivance the title is referring to—these calculated by-the-numbers conditions under which the work is done, but remaining open to how such dictates and certainties are ultimately vulnerable to whim, to an improvisatory impulse, prone to be turned on its head and reverse-engineered into the opponent energies of uncertainty.

This is the other half of the show’s dichotomy: the “almost,” the breaking of visual and narrative continuity whether organically or deliberately. Villanueva and Serrano make these rules for themselves then subsequently and unwittingly, to a certain degree, or so they say, break them. In the context of their original agendas, it was all about the image being absolute, but as it is now, the image has become less the final object and more a point of departure. There are very specific narratives these works want to evoke collectively and individually; a narrative of editing and manipulation, of altering an image and reorganizing its truth to arrive at a different one, and a narrative of waylaid plans and how disruption is often the acme of the creative impulse.

Almost Contrived is quintessentially about the various fidelities and infidelities an artist harbors for the process and how they are dismantled in the waylaying of intentions, creating all sorts of invigorating tensions: between intention and result, between organic and calculated, between truth and untruth.

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