By Tito Genova Valiente / E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
F rom Galleria Duemila in Pasay City comes a a show bearing the title The Silence of J. The artist is Luis “Junyee” Lee.
The media release quotes Susan Sontag’s The Aesthetics of Silence, where the writer investigates how silence reconciles art’s function as a form of spirituality in an increasingly secular culture. Sontag writes, “The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway.” According to Galleria Duemila, Junyee “attempts to estimate his ruminations on silence in The Silence of J, his solo exhibition wherein approximations of light, space and perspective are modified, diluted, to a conflicting, yet visually decisive, investigation on his very own aesthetics of silence.”
The pieces are described thusly: “In The Silence of J, the walls are seamlessly hung with sparse four-sided woodworks, evocative reliefs made from sturdy jointed tongue-and-groove planks, whitewashed in ivory, snow and eggshell—tonal values that have determined the depth and perspective of Junyee’s muted permutations. Presenting a flowchart of processes and traces of quaintly discontinued paint job, he reveals the architectural and utilitarian qualities of the medium, while nondescript shapes—slivers of flaked-off paint and linear dents hint at a feeling of Fontana’s iconic post-object slashes. Much in the way in which his sparse compositions seemingly manifest as diagrams or blueprints of a utopian construct in the heady technological apocalypse of the now, silence makes perfect sense.”
Junyee pioneered installation-art and outdoor-installation festivals in the Philippines. He is the sole contemporary bamboo artist in the Asean region. He has won numerous awards and accolades, such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines’s 13 Artist Award in 1980, Grant Award-Israel Philippines Monument Design Competition for the Holocaust Memorial in 2007, UPAA Distinguished Alumni Award for Arts and Culture and Tanglaw ng Sining Award for Outstanding Alumnus of the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in 2013.
The exhibit runs from June 4 to 30 at Galleria Duemila on Loring Saint in Pasay City.
Also in June, ArtistSpace and Ysobel Art Gallery, in collaboration with the Rotary Club Makati West (RCMW) and Pedro Brewcrafters, present Surviving the Burning Fields, the solo exhibition of Tristram Miravalles.
According to the curator, the artist “paints a strange, dissonant and corrupt world and impresses on the idea of futility and unconsciously summons the idea of the absurd, where the pursuit for the meaning of life and the uncertainty of finding an answer is expressed in how his characters pine and struggle for a place and meaning in an irrational world.”
The media release also states how the exhibition “constructs a world that is in a perpetual melee, and surveys themes of life and death, human conditions and limitations, freedoms and volitions, as well as subjectivities and agencies. It sets itself in a dyspeptic environment full of transgressions and malevolent activities fixating on substance abuse as witnessed by the artist.”
The exhibition locates itself in the immediate reality basking in the peculiarities of experiences operating on personal and social contradictions. It is a registry of Miravalles’s observations.
Miravalles hails from Bacolod City. He took Fine Arts and studied Painting at the La Consolacion College, Bacolod. Locally, he has been represented by established art institutions, such as the Negros Museum (Bacolod), Boston Gallery, Blanc and Ysobel Art Gallery in Manila, to name a few. Overseas, he has brought his works to Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia through collective exhibitions. He has also been a recipient of several art grants from organizations that include IILM School of Design (Delhi, India, 2015), HOM Art Trans (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2014) and SAGE Residency (Jakarta, Indonesia, 2013).
Surviving The Burning Fields will open on June 2, 6 pm, and will be in view until June 15 at ArtistSpace, Ground Level, Ayala Museum, Annex, Makati Avenue corner Dela Rosa Street, Greenbelt Park, Makati City. The gallery is open daily from 10 am to 7 pm. Admission is free of charge.