This exhibit will feature oriental ink-paintings, with careful gradations of black sumi-ink calligraphically applied to handmade paper mounted on traditional Japanese shikishi board. Traditional influences from medieval Zen Sumi-e paintings, to early-modern Ukiyo-e from the likes of Katsushika Hokusai, to modern Japanese paintings such as those from Kaburaki Kiyokata and Kayama Matazo, meet a Filipina-Chinese with a contemporary rendition of timeless human narratives.

Catherine Jao is a Filipino-Chinese full-time painter currently living in Kyoto, Japan. Her primary genre is oriental ink painting, a painting style which like its sibling art—eastern calligraphy—uses a traditional fude brush to apply sumi ink on handmade paper. By synthesizing her own personal and contemporary touch with various medieval and modern influences from Japan and China, she strives to contribute to bringing this Tang Dynasty tradition back to life.

“Your body is not an implement but a ballistic” is a quote taken from Lingis’ book Abuses, in reference to a Nicaraguan rebel who Lingis meets by chance while driving to Matagalpa. Lingis sensually traces his every movement in this recollection, charting his fluid, panther-like grace as he ushers Lingis from his hotel room into the rainforest to escape an ominous midnight visit from the Contras. Lush descriptions of bodies in action, described to the point of hypnotizing eroticism, are fundamental to his address of the progressive subjugation of the third world under the imperatives of global exchange. Counter to the current standard of academic philosophers myopically sheltered within comfortable university offices, it is his body’s risk of life across myriad adventures that forms the crux of his argumentation. Lingis asserts that the self is not a singular consciousness, but rather porous to the point of dissolution; and in his writings, we witness the dispersal of his own subjectivity.

These writings were the impetus for engaging in the vocabulary of nude formalist photography, rooted in the work of Edward Weston, and continued in the images of Robert Mapplethorpe, Nobuyoshi Araki, and others. Reflecting on Lingis’ sensual and formally innovative prose, we sought a counterpart in bodies that, through intensive training, are inscribed with a highly specified language. Bodies that, even when stripped bare, act as ciphers.

The models Carla Mendoza, Nelson Pelayo, and Rafael Nombrehermoso are fire dancers based in Boracay who are past and present members of a group called THE TRILOGY: An Introduction to the Art of Fire Dancing. Executing complicated maneuvers with chains attached to flaming Kevlar cloth balls, these dancers perform nightly in an outdoor beach bar context.

The photographs were taken at Microtel, Boracay, with the assistance of Gym Lumbera, Timmy Harn, Raya Martin, and Lodovico Pignatti-Morano.

Nothing accurate, everything imagined.

Floating in the amniotic with eyes closed, ears muffled and nose without recognition of scent, all things happening inside are unfamiliar in the absence of ultrasound; a blind introduction to the small world of the womb and outside. A colorful deviation from the ‘science creation.’

Amniotic is a “a fictional form of life-creation” as expressed thru video art and sound art. Inspired by the ability to produce another life by these two soon-to-be parents, experiencing first-hand the magic of creation and ultimately deconstructing the concept of it.

An exploration in a manner guided more by intuition & imagination.

Video Projections by: IVAN DESPI + PAULINE VICENCIO-DESPI
Original sound by: PAULINE VICENCIO-DESPI
IVAN DESPI + PAULINE VICENCIO-DESPI

IS AN EXPERIMENTAL DUO BEHIND THE SHOWS
GLASS FEATHERS AND BABEL.
BOTH HAVE JOINED A NUMBER OF GROUP EXHIBITS
LOCALLY AND EXHIBITED WORKS IN
“ENDFRAME, A VIDEO ART EXPOSITION”,
“JUMPCUT 2, ALSO SHOWN IN DARWIN, AUSTRLIA”,
“ONE MINUTES – BEIJING AND BELGIUM”,
AND “TULAY: SAN FRANCISCO, CA.”

Gilubong ang Akon Pusod sa Dagat was originally shown last August 2011 to the community of Madridejos, Cebu, and was reshown in the Cinema Rehiyon Film Festival at Gallery Orange, Bacolod in February. It is selected and organized by curator Clarissa Chikiamco to be shown in Pablo X for its first exhibition and screening in Metro Manila. The project received funding from the National Commission of Culture and the Arts and DKC Dienst Kunst en Cultuur Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Its other partners include the Office of Culture and Design and UNEP United Nations Environmental Programme.

In his exhibition entitled “PATHS”, Nico delves inward, creating a scenario that reflects his lifelong passion and fascination for Japanese culture, tradition and practice. With Aikido, a Japanese martial arts tradition that the artist practices everyday, as his locus, Puertollano uses the physical manifestation of paths as a movement that graces the space between the nage (thrower) and the uke (the one being thrown) and renders it into a presence that transcends a moment.

Quoting O Sensei, the founder of modern day Aikido, “Ultimately, you must forget about technique. The further you progress, the fewer teachings there are. The great path is really no path.”

All children have been told at one time or another by their mothers not to do certain things, go to certain places, or associate with certain people. But every child will have disobeyed at least one of these warnings, and the consequences will have shaped the people they will eventually become.

Strange Times is a loose chronicle of a girl named Lila who is continually disobeying her mother’s warnings. Choosing to err on the side of imagination and exploration, Lila takes risks and lives with the consequences, which can run from the dark to the delightful.

The exhibit is a collaboration between The Curious Studio’s Wiji Lacsamana and award-winning horror writer Yvette Tan, with Tan writing a sentence, Lacsamana painting what she envisioned, and Tan creating a story from the resulting painting and rendering it in calligraphy.

There are strange times in every child’s life, times when reality blurs with imagination. Most children forget this when they enter adulthood. Some, like Lila, chose to live with its scars.

The Collaborators

Wiji Lacsamana of The Curious Studio is a self-taught graphic designer, watercolorist and tattoo artist whose influences include Edward Gorey, Carson Ellis, Yelena Bryksenkova and Jillian Tamaki. The ocean, moon, whales and forest are recurring themes in her work, which constantly explores and intertwines the possibilities between graphic design, contemporary illustration and tattoos.

Yvette Tan writes about anything from food to fashion to personalities to travel. Her horror fiction has won numerous awards, and nowadays, tends to explore the link between food and being frightened.

Join us for the inaugural exhibit of PABLO X

Modified Either No In or Out

featuring the works of

Nemo Aguila
Bjorn Calleja
Rommel Celespara
Jigger Cruz
Don Dalmacio
Beejay Esber
Egg Fiasco
Edric Go
Dave Lock
Epjey Pacheco

The Artists will be presenting their trademark genre bending, shape shifting, stylish kleptomania and iconoclastic redefinition of what we might know as art, or collaboration, all the more, as street aesthetic.

December 7, 2012, Wednesday, at 7pm 2289 Pasong Tamo Extension

Photos by Migs Camacho

Paintings with sweet colorful characters tinged with idiosyncratic irony have become Calayag’s aesthetic signature. The viewer finds himself suspended in disbelief, as he witnesses the very same adorable creatures pounce, rip, stab, and tear out the hearts of rival beings for ownership of the imagination, of the dream, of the gift. In fact these innocuous looking characters that hide behind the façade of cuteness and gaiety belie the truth of their actions through random excursions of violence and betrayal. Perhaps this is Calayag’s nod to life’s complex shades of joy and its chromatic fugues of pain. In this unpredictable landscape of complex emotions and experiences, things alter their appearances: hands elongate to form ridges of a mountain, a mountain in the form of a female body, a large heart with frightening jaws of death housing innocents inside, or so they seem, in this malleable state of existence. This morphing world speaks much about Calayag’s practice of oil painting, where each stroke becomes a soft murmur of the heart that pumps blood bringing life into the brain, firing the imagination. Painting then captures the slowness of time as it is lived in the fullness of the moment. It is when time stops to allow the mind to expand, to allow consciousness to drift, to return to a time of bliss. According to Calayag, painting has provided him the only possible moment that reclaims that lost feeling of childhood, of innocence lost. In this forever magical moment, the painter conjures a world that only belongs to him, with symbols and figures that create their own narrative, weaving fantastic episodes that might portend of things to come or things to be. Thus by doing so, the artist reclaims the lost mantle of prophetic messenger, which stretches back to the dawn of humanity, as man becomes aware of his place in the world bearing a gift that allows him to cast the world according to his imagination, dreaming a world that can be made better through his craft, ultimately sharing this gift with others to make their dreams into a reality.

Arvin Flores

An Exhibition featuring the works of Allan Balisi, Dex Fernandez, Cos Zicarelli, Nile Pobadora and Mark Salvatus in celebration of Pablo’s 6th year Anniversary.

RESET/PLAY
Text by Gou de Jesus

Painter Jason Moss reclaims the human condition through a re-imagining of form, function and values, as he decodes and reconstructs old film photographs on canvas. The timeworn is honored anew on at least two levels. First, in mimicking the originality of the film grab, Moss engages his audience in a reflexive ritual, weaving ample visual cues in the paintings themselves as to his process and technique. Second, the re-rendering of memorable filmic moments celebrates light and shadow in a rich and bold palette—uncharacteristic Moss, some might say, but arguably a playful Moss, who breaks out of his aesthetic mannerisms into a deeper world within that resonates with many a movie moment.

And Moss is pleased with his romanticized versions of photographs, a collection that brings to the fore his own journey through time and its markers: triumphs, losses, mistakes and corrections. The self-critic/teacher also emerges in their creation, as Moss formulates commentaries on measurement and proportion embedded in the canvas, which in turn reflect perspectives of learning, stored thought and images. The paintings are equally informed by transitions and good doses of humor echoing the intrigues and uncertainties that plague every artist’s act of creation.