Wazzup Pilipinas!Galleria Duemila proudly presents
They Speak to You by Association, a group exhibition which features the works of six contemporary artists,
Felix Bacolor, Mariano Ching, Yasmin Sison, RM de Leon, Jonathan Olazo, and Trek Valdzino—together they present compositions which dislodge from traditional facets of painting and installation formats. Loaded with variation and modified styles, the artists reanimate and restructure existing edifications in art to conflicting yet visually decisive investigations on aesthetic identity and progression.
Felix Bacolor’s artistic practice combines a playful dynamic in production and investigation in art-making through a variety of thoroughly researched interests and media such as video, installation and sculpture. Over the years Bacolor mastered the production of object prototypes for his sculpture studies. All this enabled him to experiment rich possibilities in collecting and repurposing objects, and in working with digitized and tangible prototypes in manufacturing. Bacolor studied Studio Arts (Painting) at University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. Among numerous solo and group exhibitions in the Philippines, his work has also been exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design; Manila, Osage Gallery; Hong Kong, Equator Art Projects; and Valentine Willie Fine Art; Malaysia.
Having been trained as an illustrator and photographer, Mariano Ching’s work bellies a sophisticated spatial awareness. His references are largely attributed a surplus of his imagination and are bolsters a childlike receptivity, which comes with an underlying psychedelia pushed forward by his various paradoxical leitmotifs such as voodoo or colonial iconography. An accomplish artist he is a recipient of the Monbusho Japanese Grant and Cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Artists Award. His works have been exhibited in France, Malaysia, Singapore and the United States. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts (major in Painting) at the University of the Philippines. Some of his works belong have been acquired by prestigious art collections including that of the Singapore Art Museum.
Revitalizing or making an image from found images is key to RM de Leon’s practice—from the kitsch and cartoonish, or at times the banal, he interweaves them together, deconstructing or obliterating to the effect of abstracting the recognizable. Though the accumulated process of omitting or reanimating elements to aesthetic balance is certainly not a minimal task, his outputs are painstakingly sparse and comes with a certain sensitivity. He incorporates these fragmented elements with exquisite painterly acts—the result is a hybrid of images that bestride representation and abstraction, painting and graphic design, products that seemingly embody the contemporariness and ambiguity of the insurmountable surge of images in today’s technological apocalypse. De Leon completed a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 1984. He was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards in 1990. An accomplished artist he has received numerous accolades and grants such as Vermont Studio Center (USA) scholarship for studio arts program for painting. He is currently an art professor at the De La Salle-College of St. Benilde.
Jonathan Olazo’s work manipulate and merge an array of materials and formats such as oil and acrylic on canvas, assembled objects in wood, aluminum, ready-made industrial materials, and photography related media. Olazo’s recent outputs pushes forward through and attempts to preserve William C. Seitz’s 1961 commentary on assemblage as, “all forms of composite art and modes of juxtaposition.” The artist situates his work to a rich possibility of dialogue between the bespoke and the readymade, painting and sculpture, and between the act of painting and the reproducibility of images. Jonathan Olazo completed a BFA Painting degree from the College of Fine Arts at University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, in 1992 and was a recipient of Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award in 1994.
Yasmin Sison incorporates pop art and figurative elements in her oeuvre; she is also well-known for her sensitive and unwavering children portraits, which offers a panoptic view of the subjects shifting emotional, physical, and psychological transitions. An accomplished artist, Sison holds a degree in Bachelor of Fine Arts, Major in Painting in UP Diliman. She was a recipient of a 13 Artists Awards in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards in 2007.
Trek Valdizno wields unconventional painting tools to achieve gestural abstraction, which is brought by his distinct process; mobilized with urgency; and mostly resulting in layers of quaintly overlapped biomorphic figures. Pluralistic and athletic, the works take the onlooker on a frantic gestural joyride. His work quintessentially showcase, in every sense of the word, a excess of painterly acts as it is not a secret that his acrylics can prance, skate, rollover, crochet, coil, collide, and coagulate. He completed a BFA Painting degree from the College of Fine Arts at University of the Philippines in Diliman. His work has been exhibited in Ayala Museum, Vargas Museum, and Cultral Center of the Philippines.
Exhibition Run: August 6 - 29, 2016
Opening Reception: August 6, Saturday 4pm
They Speak To You By Association
Felix Bacolor, Mariano Ching, RM de Leon,
Jonathan Olazo, Yasmin Sison and Trek Valdzino
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