Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 10:00 a.m.
Ramón Lerma – The Ateneo Art Gallery: An Art Museum for our Time
Redolent with allusions to Gaea, de Loyola powerfully portrays the definitive feminist icon. It is also not difficult to see that her creative well-spring draws from the artist’s devotion to mater patria – convulsing in a complete and utter offering of self. (4)
A fact of everyday life is that people go missing all the time. Sometimes they’re found, and often they’re not. Yasmin Sison’s “missing persons” in “Unmade” (Mag:net Paseo, 9 – 27 May 2006) are still to be found. A possible resurrection awaits them, somewhere, at the end of time perhaps, but not here and now. For the moment, they are present in form but absent in appearance, manifest but not recognizable.
To spontaneously combust is one thing, to be salvaged by the paramilitary another. And then there are people who disappear voluntarily as well, taking on new lives and new names, killing their old selves off. Indeed, there are an infinite number of ways in which to rub out anyone (and/or else to have them rub off on you), and Yasmin Sison’s images are laden with enough ambiguity to cancel out any stories we might otherwise imagine for them.
Her erasures point the way to coping with disappearance itself, to virtual absence as it were, to the places in one’s heart and mind where missing persons’ faces are gone but still reside. At once humorous and terrifying, hers is a world where vanishing is an act chronicled. “Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be opened to you.”5
Like a Bombix moth that spins a cocoon of silk, or a frugal spinster that collects twine and rolls it into a ball, ever tighter, ever bigger, Mac Valdezco does with society’s detritus in “Small Complete Units” (Avellana Art Gallery, 14 April – 19 May 2007): strips of paper from a printing press, shoelace and cotton string, and cotton tape. Using the hot glue to hold pieces together or the mere force of knotting and tying, Valdezco transgresses the boundaries between craft and art.
The artist admits that she begins with no fixed plan or concept but rather allows the material to speak to her. It is in the interaction between physicality and the artist’s intuitive drive to create that her biomorphic forms arise. Changing Bodies # 5, for example, is a dense works of tightly bound shoelaces but hang delicately like a weaver bird’s nest. Hard put to say if her works are art or craft, whether they are sculpture or installation, or how her works can be displayed on a more permanent basis, Valdezco’s works are compelling forms doomed to decay but while they last they arrest the senses.[6]
Articulation and the slur are Jevijoe Vitug’s primary tools in “Capitali-sing” (Finale Art Gallery, 8-27 March 2007). Incredibly, he commits this “slurring” in painting installations of very specific imagery, figurations so painstakingly rendered it’s hard to believe that his is an alter purpose.
That purpose means much to a painter distinct in his brushwork but oblique in his conclusions; an artist who says one thing and conjures something infinitely else; a concept-savvy scholar of folksy doubletalk.
The slur, the smearing of edges, the osmosis between frames, is Vitug’s chosen premise. Day-old chicks embalmed in stone hard resin; mad, beautiful, screaming nymphs painted in lurid detail; stuffed dogs watching television; spooky pentagrams and flags; elemental fire, wind and water – these and other disparate elements vie for our attention, then just as quickly dissolve into a sensurround vista of fearsome scale.
With Vitug, slurring is a dialect in itself. And in between the slurred frames of a cyclical saga are weightless voids the size of moon craters. And in those voids reside much danger and chance. And out of danger and chance has sprung some of the greatest art of the past century.[7]
In the face of such promise, the Ateneo Art Gallery reiterates its commitment to support contemporary Philippine art through a host of other initiatives that relate to the Awards. The recipients of the Ateneo Art Gallery international studio residency grants are given the opportunity to respond to their overseas forays through an annual exhibition at the museum presaging the following year’s round of nominations.
Earlier this year, we also updated the Gallery website (http://gallery.ateneo.edu) to give previous winners and short-listed artists a dedicated page to promote their new projects; while two landmark projects, “Art and Society” which brought together art patrons and artists in a fundraising project to further endow the Awards, and “Power of Art” which enabled artists to court new publics through shop front displays, all contributed to increasing exponentially the high profile the Awards and the Gallery already enjoy.
Looking forward, the Ateneo Art Gallery draws inspiration from forging new linkages, bridging differences, creating opinions, and translating visions – giving a voice to those who seek to shock, awe, provoke and inspire through the universal language of art.
4 Ramon E.S. Lerma, “Racquel de Loyola,” in Global/Vernacular, exhibition catalogue, Ateneo Art Gallery
5 Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Yasmin Sison,” in Global/Vernacular, exhibition catalogue, Ateneo Art Gallery
6 Rene Javellana, SJ, “Mac Valdezco,” in Global/Vernacular, exhibition catalogue, Ateneo Art Gallery
7 Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Jevijoe Vitug,” in Global/Vernacular, exhibition catalogue, Ateneo Art Gallery
