If painting has increasingly becoming its own surplus product, does it put the whole practice of it as a belabored exercise in hypotentializing its redundancy throughout the course of its chronic subsistence? However, to put so much blind faith on the novelty of such may however place it instead as anachronistic. The deluded wrappings of the vested promise of newness of which capitalist market goods are recognized by may not be equally subscribed to by painting yet it is almost always anticipated to be possessed of at the very least of its seductive sheen and hip discursive glossolalia. But for whatever its worth, the new shall always be welcomed with intrepidness for it is how the value for the past, the seemingly obsolete, the feudal and the monolithically imperial will continually be exacted upon. But painting hangs at the threadbare parallel stretch of this tenuous line. The excess it may revel in putrefacts in this juncture. Through the cultivated icons and imagery it has borne on its surface and by which it engages them as 'capital' for their 'multiple re-investments' and consequent consumption, their fluctuating degrees of value and 'use' or rather their increment devaluation to clich will continually be binged upon and regurgitated after. There seems to be no end to this cycle, no matter how foreboding the produced results may be for each heave and throw to portend to some sort of eschatology for painting which rather elicits the opposite - the scatology of painting with its excess and its need to be expunged off its excess to be fed again and satiate such bulimia.
This may seem the case for the approaches to painting in an exhibit featuring the works of California based Fil-Am artists Arvin Flores, Carlo Ricafort, Jose Guinto and Manuel Ocampo opening at the Mag:net this July. Though each artist have their own epistemological discourse through their definitive approach to form, they share an affinity for excess: in either the all-over smear of ejaculatory exuberance for the whole process of painting and the perplexing mnge of imagery appropriated from mass media, popular culture and art academia twisted and basted in their historic moldy stew.
Carlo Ricafort, who cites hip hop and jazz music as an inspiration to his art making, takes on sampling - the very mechanics by which hip hop is structured, and likewise the improvisational free-formlessness of jazz - to the layering and juxtaposition of his images that seem culled from the juvenile recesses of much TV viewing and comics reading. The resulting painting is a rough-hewn encumbered surface entangled with the morsels of nostalgia. If these paintings were sandwiches, they would be open-faced mongrels of mystery meatloaf revolting against a homogenizing mayonnaise all compressed on slices of white wonder bread.
Manuel Ocampo's recurrent themes subject stereotypical imagery to their limp regurgitated forms by which its very repetition make for its perpetual reanimation and persistence of its "being carriers of meaning" or as polemical totems of some grand esthetic theory but bludgeoned to farce. As paintings, such ideations are but matter and meat invested in with the perverse desire for their abjection that either attract and repulse like tabloid headlines - grimy, colloquial, abstract and absurd.
Arvin Flores, in his series Salvific Agony on Canvas, adapts toon figures to depict the romantic themes of torments and despair of the artist-creator whereby a mindful devotion to one's craft transcendence may be achieved, such a medievalist aim of the icon makers of that time. Yet to carry on with similar aims today may deem the practice of painting esoterically archaic but attainable by formal means. However, to channel this contemporarily, they have to be embodied in contemporarily recognizable visual idioms as newly fangled icons stretched out to caricature, the props to an allegorical tableau seemingly shopped for at a Warner Brothers Acme depot, and transcendence feasibly entered into by submission into plasticity - a hole away from the drudgery of routine.
Jose Guinto's black and white drawings are characterized by murky ink wash spilling from the paper or the canvas' edges where it ominously engulfs the empty space as an avalanche of umbrellas, tree stumps, rocking chairs, oil barrels, a bawling baby. In one work, a figure with a swollen belly sleeps on a rocky mound oblivious to the gloomy clouds. The same figure appears in several drawings, pictured at times as a carpetbagging survivor of a wreckage, hitchhiking by tornado, swept to some nowhere land with all the remnants of a ruined civilization.
Carlo Ricafort immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of 10. In 2000, he received his B.F.A. in Pictorial Arts from San Jose State University and has exhibited at numerous galleries and cultural spaces mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past 2 years, Ricafort has collaborated with the artist collective Kwatro-Kantos in organizing exhibits - one of which was recently at the Philippine Cultural Center in January of this year. He helps run a printing business and is based in San Francisco, CA.
Arvin Flores is a Philippine-born painter with an MFA graduate degree from Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York NY, and a BFA from the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. He has shown nationally at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Hampden Gallery, Columbia University's LeRoy Neiman and Wallach Art Galleries, Aljira Contemporary Art Center NJ, and at Southern Exposure Gallery SF. Flores has teaching experience at Columbia University NY, California College of the Arts, and the University of California at Berkeley Extension. He is based in Oakland, California.
Jose Guinto is a painter/printmaker, and educator with an MFA degree from Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York, NY. "Guinto's artwork provides an ongoing reflection of the world that surrounds us, depicting physical and metaphoric environments. He articulates through his images ideas that indulge in the ridiculous. The dark humor he utilizes in his work is a play on absurdity and futility as a means of satire. The bleakness of the images implies the desperation one encounters in the sleep of reason. " Jose has taught at Columbia University, and currently teaches at the California College of the Arts in the First Year Drawing and 2D Program, Printmaking Department and is part of the visiting studio faculty of the CCA Graduate Program. He shows nationally and internationally. Jose was born in the Philippines, and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
Manuel Ocampo has been around the international art circuit for 20 years now. He has participated in numerous international Biennale's and group shows, most notably Helter Skelter; LA art of the 90's . His art deals with the representation of ideology and the ideology of representation. Swastikas, crosses, skulls, and various political symbols are used to create spontaneous flights of fancy and narratives that opens up new realms for the imagination.
Nu Works will be available for viewing from July 4 thru 31 of 2009. A reception for the artists will be held on the 11th of July, Saturday from 6 - 9PM.
Mag:net Gallery is located at 335 Agcor Building, Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City. For details or inquiries contact the gallery at 929-31-91 or email info@magnetgalleries.com or visit www.magnetgalleries.com
This may seem the case for the approaches to painting in an exhibit featuring the works of California based Fil-Am artists Arvin Flores, Carlo Ricafort, Jose Guinto and Manuel Ocampo opening at the Mag:net this July. Though each artist have their own epistemological discourse through their definitive approach to form, they share an affinity for excess: in either the all-over smear of ejaculatory exuberance for the whole process of painting and the perplexing mnge of imagery appropriated from mass media, popular culture and art academia twisted and basted in their historic moldy stew.
Carlo Ricafort, who cites hip hop and jazz music as an inspiration to his art making, takes on sampling - the very mechanics by which hip hop is structured, and likewise the improvisational free-formlessness of jazz - to the layering and juxtaposition of his images that seem culled from the juvenile recesses of much TV viewing and comics reading. The resulting painting is a rough-hewn encumbered surface entangled with the morsels of nostalgia. If these paintings were sandwiches, they would be open-faced mongrels of mystery meatloaf revolting against a homogenizing mayonnaise all compressed on slices of white wonder bread.
Manuel Ocampo's recurrent themes subject stereotypical imagery to their limp regurgitated forms by which its very repetition make for its perpetual reanimation and persistence of its "being carriers of meaning" or as polemical totems of some grand esthetic theory but bludgeoned to farce. As paintings, such ideations are but matter and meat invested in with the perverse desire for their abjection that either attract and repulse like tabloid headlines - grimy, colloquial, abstract and absurd.
Arvin Flores, in his series Salvific Agony on Canvas, adapts toon figures to depict the romantic themes of torments and despair of the artist-creator whereby a mindful devotion to one's craft transcendence may be achieved, such a medievalist aim of the icon makers of that time. Yet to carry on with similar aims today may deem the practice of painting esoterically archaic but attainable by formal means. However, to channel this contemporarily, they have to be embodied in contemporarily recognizable visual idioms as newly fangled icons stretched out to caricature, the props to an allegorical tableau seemingly shopped for at a Warner Brothers Acme depot, and transcendence feasibly entered into by submission into plasticity - a hole away from the drudgery of routine.
Jose Guinto's black and white drawings are characterized by murky ink wash spilling from the paper or the canvas' edges where it ominously engulfs the empty space as an avalanche of umbrellas, tree stumps, rocking chairs, oil barrels, a bawling baby. In one work, a figure with a swollen belly sleeps on a rocky mound oblivious to the gloomy clouds. The same figure appears in several drawings, pictured at times as a carpetbagging survivor of a wreckage, hitchhiking by tornado, swept to some nowhere land with all the remnants of a ruined civilization.
Carlo Ricafort immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of 10. In 2000, he received his B.F.A. in Pictorial Arts from San Jose State University and has exhibited at numerous galleries and cultural spaces mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past 2 years, Ricafort has collaborated with the artist collective Kwatro-Kantos in organizing exhibits - one of which was recently at the Philippine Cultural Center in January of this year. He helps run a printing business and is based in San Francisco, CA.
Arvin Flores is a Philippine-born painter with an MFA graduate degree from Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York NY, and a BFA from the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. He has shown nationally at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Hampden Gallery, Columbia University's LeRoy Neiman and Wallach Art Galleries, Aljira Contemporary Art Center NJ, and at Southern Exposure Gallery SF. Flores has teaching experience at Columbia University NY, California College of the Arts, and the University of California at Berkeley Extension. He is based in Oakland, California.
Jose Guinto is a painter/printmaker, and educator with an MFA degree from Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York, NY. "Guinto's artwork provides an ongoing reflection of the world that surrounds us, depicting physical and metaphoric environments. He articulates through his images ideas that indulge in the ridiculous. The dark humor he utilizes in his work is a play on absurdity and futility as a means of satire. The bleakness of the images implies the desperation one encounters in the sleep of reason. " Jose has taught at Columbia University, and currently teaches at the California College of the Arts in the First Year Drawing and 2D Program, Printmaking Department and is part of the visiting studio faculty of the CCA Graduate Program. He shows nationally and internationally. Jose was born in the Philippines, and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
Manuel Ocampo has been around the international art circuit for 20 years now. He has participated in numerous international Biennale's and group shows, most notably Helter Skelter; LA art of the 90's . His art deals with the representation of ideology and the ideology of representation. Swastikas, crosses, skulls, and various political symbols are used to create spontaneous flights of fancy and narratives that opens up new realms for the imagination.
Nu Works will be available for viewing from July 4 thru 31 of 2009. A reception for the artists will be held on the 11th of July, Saturday from 6 - 9PM.
Mag:net Gallery is located at 335 Agcor Building, Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City. For details or inquiries contact the gallery at 929-31-91 or email info@magnetgalleries.com or visit www.magnetgalleries.com
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