|
The practice of painting is in itself a long arduous
process, a journeyman’s excursion into self-discovery. Thus, it is
a solitary act that feeds (unto) itself, a feeding that gains its
momentum from a life just glimpsed through the windows of a white
cube. Otherwise, it’s an entrapment willingly plummeted into to
lose one’s self into the very process of gradual becoming.
Undeterred devotion then is the reedy bow of virtuosity.
Bernardo Pacquing in his exhibit
Envisage opening at the Mag:net this Thursday elucidates such dogged
persistence to practice with his paintings that are seemingly
guilefully effecting naivete with its bright scrawl-like strokes,
careening across flat planes of color or mussed obsessively in a
corner. These paintings bear the uncanny resemblance of a child’s
wanton scribbling on the walls of a mid-century dwelling that has
never retouched its original coat of paint but marked.
Intermittently by patches,
swathes of colors and tones that attempt to erase the previous
scribbles—a picture of a house with a triangle roof, an airplane
hovering over clouds, or just plain attempts at writing or drawing.
However, these are perhaps
Pacquing’s continued exercise in undoing familiar imagery to get
at impressions of memory of things, of objects, distilled as
surface, yet they are precariously reconstructed as their very
remembrance quickens to a certain amnesia. This is paralleled by his
process of applying and sanding over several layers of latex,
plaster, and oil paint, and the scribbling he does with pencil. Yet
this undoing is at the same time, a precise exercise that’s
carefully deliberated upon and begets a certain mastery. Akin to
playing adagio exercises on a violin before attempting to play a
composition of its own as though to temper the fingers to the many
nuances of plucking, stringing and fiddling as to have the violin be
an extension itself of the wielder, so does the same devotion to
painting would render the practice itself as an expeditious instinct
for the painter, for a transcendence that plateaus for the tangible
forms.
For further inquiry please
contact 817-7895 or e-mail magnetplus@gmail.com or visit
www.magnet.com.ph
|
