“No Walls No Problem”
Alejandra Fonseca, Aze Ong, Carlo Ricafort, Cheeny Celebrado Royer, Erick Encinares, Ged Merino, Gerrie Fabonan, Isabel Santos, Kat Medina, Jayson Oliveria, Jigger Cruz, Jun Sabayton, Manuel Ocampo, Masi Oliveria, Nelson Plested, Zeus Bascon
Grey Space, 331 P. Guevarra St, Little Baguio, San Juan City
5-26 October 2024
Opening : 5 October, Saturday, 5PM
Paintings were originally stand ins for windows, painted or hung on walls to Jun present pictures of vistas. Vista itself is Italian for view. The closest window we have that we open to view is our eyes, curtained by our eyelids and/or prejudices. The Romans added theatricality to make a spectacle of their domicile, expanding spaces of their habitation if only phantasmically, painting trompe l'oeils of posts, steps, balustrades on their stuccoed walls. Not so different actually when they drew animals on cave walls and made IG reels out of them.
I will skip ahead to 20th century Western modern movement where they made paintings the walls themselves, where ground was elevated to a vertical plane, the stretchers become formidable scaffoldings, becoming fixtures of white cubes and corporate lobbies.
Grey Space presented itself as a challenge/dilemma as a space with literally no walls, an antithesis to the ubiquitous white cubes of the art trade - cavernous, with sparse grey concrete posts and exposed electrical wiring that run in grids beneath a clangy GI sheet roofing. Paintings or any artworks for that matter would have to find a way to occupy such a space – maybe they can lean, slouch, lie down, crumple, sit, hang not from walls, but from rafters and improvised risers. Freed from the pediments of frames and stretchers, it becomes conscious of its materiality – canvas, silk, used kimonos, nylon, yarn, wool, mesh, paper . It is a world and reality of itself, grown to embrace other ways of mark making – printed on, sewn on, drawn on, carved on. This made me look back at Rosalind Krauss’ essay Sculpture in The Expanded Field. Written in 1979, she expounds on how sculpture, the discipline, practice, and form, have transgressed into the boundaries of architecture. Its expansion has lead rather to a blurring of boundaries, and being fully conscious of the space it occupies and how that space is affected by its intervention. The integration of multi-disciplines in creating works from such hybridity creates both a negation and redefinition of the form and practice of it, hence, the “expansion of the field”, including its perception of it. This comes especially at a time when postmodernity and a drive towards a plurality of views and historical perspective come to question monolithic homogeneity of previous ideals.
For this exhibit, I have consciously considered works beyond the strict rigors of painting, and rather looked at how surface is being activated or engaged with. Many of these works have explored the malleability of a soft ground such as fabric or mesh, while others have continually defied and redefined the vicissitudes of a plane-based art. Something that is pushing out of its flatness and the aura of uniqueness, as if in defiance of an emerging reality of virtuality, the digital cave of Plato, is what probably ties all these works together.
It must be said that acts of creation are always acts of transition, the work always in flux, to paraphrase Australian artist Laura Owens.
“ Painting (or rather for this purpose, art ) is now all edges, everywhere hinged, both to itself and what it adjoins, making itself out of such relations. Those primary elements of (painting) are not lost but function independently or as radical hybrids….. the surface of (painting) becomes a place rather than a window or a barrier… At the surfacing of (painting), objects gather and events take place. “
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Shapes of Inhabitation : Painting in the expanded field, Mark Titmarsh, Art Monthly Australia, May 2006
Forty-five years hence, in expanding this field of making, the center is all centers all around and the field is littered rather with debris from crumbled walls. No walls, no problem, or is it really?
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