Opening Reception
Saturday, June 27,2009
7:00 pm

EXPLODING IDOLS. Damag comes from a culture of builders. His forefathers built structures that have survived over two millenia. Carrying on his ancestry, Damag knows there is necessity in the primal act of destruction. Trees must be felled for a rice god. Though differently from his forebears, he destroys not within nature but within history; a history he carries with him as he shuttles between places of origin and of passage, between affinities local and foreign.

Against an environment where constructs of self are a dime a dozen, with museums and blog pages incessantly framing quaint, and easy anecdotes meant to pin down humanity proliferating in haste and sameness, Damag endeavors to shake level-headed consciousness with one sure blow of a meat cleaver (Cook in the Kitchen, collaboration with M. Ocampo, 2004) or the incessant racket of a circular saw cutting an idol into pieces (Offering to Michel Leiris, 1996).

In some works, he does not completely diminish the object to oblivion as perhaps the intensity of his actions suggest. He distracts, keeping the essence of the idol (his model/fetish) intact though he drags it through the most incongruent conditions: molten, compressed, spinned at 3,600 revolutions per minute (Disappearance 1, 2000) or hung from a dizzying height of 18 meters, dropped with a weight of 60 kilos only to bang its head on a metal bar and be dropped again (Just Falling, 2006).

In other works, Damag participates in the idol’s own disappearing act as he does with his recent take on photographs shot nine years ago. Seemingly capable of setting idols free from the trappings of history, we are given a strange feeling that these bleached out pictures could well be blueprints of a psycho masterminded heist to strip all museums of its precious artifacts.

To the artist, an idol repossessed represents a persona grata often caught in an act of defeating self-reference, establishing irreverent mores for a generation walking a tightrope between infantile self and erudite other. “YES, NO, YES, NO!” shouts the artist incessantly in a video (2007) proposing nothing but hollow mechanical exclamations.

Will Damag one day liberate these collared-and-tied idols from their spotless vitrines by banging their heads against polished concrete floors till irrecognition? Has Damag finally succeeded with a simple kitchen product to free uncles whose pictures were taken (their ancestral belongings beside them) and exposed while they were still alive in some far-flung museum?

Damag’s uncles are now all dead and these pictures of them persist like nightmares in glass cases. It appears to be of no reward to explode the shell that houses them. Instead Damag finds solace in churning out more idols and engaging them in a never-ending cycle of destruction and creation as if performing a ritual. The artist’s restraint between these two forces is a gallant offering that will perhaps spare us (and himself) from the seductions of history. SP, 2009

ABOUT
Born 1964, Banaue, Philippines

SOLO SHOWS
2009 , Pablo Gallery, Taguig City.
2008 Wanted II / Shamanism, Finale Gallery, Makati City.
2007 Monument and Wanted, Green Papaya Art Projects, Quezon City, Philippines.
Eux aussi nous regardent, St. Etinne, France.
2005 Miserable intentions, Gaston Damag and Manuel Ocampo, Galerie des Grands Bains Douches de la Plaine, Marseille.
2004 Miserable intentions, Gaston Damag and Manuel Ocampo, Galerie Alimentation, Luxembourg.
2003 Vargas museum, Manille, Philippines.
2002 Foire international d’Art de Bruxelles. Presented by Alain le Gaillard de Paris Gallery and Alimentation Générale d’Art Contemporain, Luxembourg.
2001 Les disparitions, Galerie Alain Le Gaillard, Paris. Exposition.
Galerie Alimentation Générale Art Contemporain, Luxembourg.
1999 Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Sevilla, Espagne
La Naturaleza de la Cultura, Gaston Damag with Manuel Ocampo.
1996 Le 19, Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain de Montbéliard.
1994 Entre deux, Galerie de Beaux-Arts, Paris. Gaston Damag et Rebeca Berger, Exhibition.
1992 Espace d’Art Contemporain Camille Lambert, Juvisy sur Orge.

GROUP SHOWS
2007 Damag, Ocampo, Deroubaix, Magnet Galery, Quezon City, Philippines.
Heterotopias, First Thessaloniki International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece.
Hospitality, Centre d’Art Comtemporain de Camille Lambert, Juvisy sur Orge.
Liste 07, The Young Art Fair, Basel.
2006 My home is my Castle, Dexia BIL Banque Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
2005 Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. FIAC, Paris
2004 Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. FIAC, Paris
2003 Transfert, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles, Belgique.
2002 Chambre double, Galerie Alain le Gaillard. Exhibition at Hotel la Louisiane, Paris.
Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. FIAC, Paris.
2001 Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain. FIAC, Paris.
2000 Paris pour escale, Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris. A.R.C.
Chapelle Saint-Jacques.
1998-99 At home and abroad, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco / Contemporary art Museum, Huston, Texas / University of Hawaii / Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines.
1996 …le plus bel ages…, Espace Retz, Paris.
La fondation Feneon, Chapelle de la Sorbonne, Paris.
1995 Rose pour les Garçons, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Fragile, Outdoor exhibit of a selection of young artists from different European art schools, Crema, Italy.
1994 Galerie Nationale Tutesall, Luxembourg.
1993 Les félicités du jury, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
1991 Three young Artists, Galery RAM, Rotterdam.
60 artistes A suivre, Selection for the journal Eighty.
1990 Trace 1, Cave de la cour du Mûrier, Ensb-a, Paris.
Snark, Centre Poblo Neruda d’Art contemporain de la ville de Corbeille-Essonnes.
1988 Salon de jeune peinture, Grand Palais, Paris.
1989 Salon de jeune peinture, Grand Palais, Paris.
Salon de Bagneux.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY (Catalogues & Magazines)
2007 Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Gréce.
2006 My Home is my Castle, Luxembourg.
2003 Transferts, Bruxelles.
2002 Pananaw 4, N.C.C.A., Manila.
2001 BeauxArts magazine (éd. Juin).
1999 Art in America (éd. Septembre).
1998 At Home & Abroad: 20 Contemporary Filipino Artists, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
1994 Fragile, Crema, Italie.

GASTON DAMAG exhibits with Nosbaum & Reding-Art Contemporain, Luxembourg and Finale Gallery, Philippines.