A life-size skeleton created entirely from uncut, found corals atop a massive, raw driftwood; skull profiles and open hands meticulously painted and fashioned on giant clams and mother of pearl shells—the new works of artist Gregory Halili may be seen, from an untrained perspective, as nothing more than a visual paean to the sea, a sculptural ode to that overwhelming space that still remains foreign to us, despite man’s numerous explorations of it. But a Halili piece doesn’t leave its audience just scratching the surface; just like the sea, it holds waves of truths and memories.
While Halili is more known in the art circle for his miniatures, minute, yet intricate, images that have always paid homage to his homeland and its cultural rarities, the artist, in his new visual offering titled Echo, has curiously veered away from the artistic tradition that typifies his oeuvre. Instead of painting delicate and wistful portraits and sacrosanct imagery, Halili has taken on a more sculptural approach and shifted to using large materials. The change was a gradual progression, but it meant that the artist, whose training was pure painting, had to go out of his way to understand the creation of a singular sculpture.
It also meant more physical labor and travel time for sourcing the materials that went to building his larger pieces, with Halili combing and searching for found corals along the beaches of Calatagan and Anilao, Batangas, for the past two years. It didn’t seem odd to Halili that the washed-up and bleached corals he originally chanced upon during a trip to the beach mirrored human bones. The semblance was immediately symbolic—and this resonates within Halili’s latest repertoire.
Composed of 15 works, Halili’s Echo is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of natural materials and one’s symbiotic connection with nature. It presents the residual and lingering affection of man’s doings to nature, the physical manifestation of the state of our environment, and, particularly, the life-and-death cycle that man and the elements go through.
Many of us are blind to these realities, only mourning loss and death when we are faced with it head on. Halili then confronts his audience with this supposed macabre subject, but he does it so beautifully that his pieces, more than just being artistic expressions of mortality, alternately become vessels of memories and vestiges of truths.
There are infinite shapes that death can take, and the impressions they make upon us are just as varied. In Echo, Halili illuminates this fragility and fleetingness as a way to question one’s impact to the world and in the best way he knows how—with all sincerity and from the heart.
Echo is on view until February 4 at Silverlens, Lapanday Center, 2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati City.