EXHIBITION STATEMENT
The path of academically trained painter Dennis ‘Sio’ Montera initially led him through a Realist-inspired phase of creating from nature before the artist found his own pictorial language while in graduate school from 2001-2004. The following year he came back to Cebu City armed with a Masters degree in painting and mounted two important and succeeding solo exhibitions on abstract art at the Art Center of SM City Cebu and at the Bluewater Gallery of Maribago Bluewater Beach Resort. The two shows were not only well received by critics and collectors but brought to the community a fresh take on serious visual art. The artist together with only a very few Cebuano painters have taken a road less travelled by other artists in exploring the non-objective realm in mainstream art practice. The artist takes inspiration from numerous painters the like of Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, Jean Michel Basquiat, Antoni Tapies from the west and Nestor Vinluan, Lao Lianben, and Jose Joya from the Philippines. The artistic style of these painters thrills the artist and leads him to undertake his own experiments with materials, tools, and effects.
Sio Montera began to mix industrial materials with the conventional artist’s paints where he was successful in integrating his diverse resources into a convincing overall composition. His canvasses are condensed into massive, encrusted color-filled paintings of either gestural lines or scratched surfaces. The lines created in his gestural works often resemble coagulated ink blots that glide from one corner to the other with total abandon and freedom. The scratched/scraped picture plane is the most recent reinvention of the artist’s style and the indentations on the surface of the paintings function like individual graffiti, the artist set of personal coded references inscribed on the work’s ground like hardened symbols or signs.
In this latest exhibition, the artist metaphorically combines artistic production with immediate experiences of his human existence. Each of the works creates an overall effect that is based from the language of the artist’s soul and is considered by him as emblems and symbolic indications of his presence in this short life. These new installment of Sio Montera’s work has also taken distance from the linear logic of adults to arrive at the impulsive logic of children. The created visual field reassures flatness that is both direct and embracing typical of the spontaneity inherent in the spur-of-the-moment, scribble drawings. They represent for him an extraordinary mirror for multiplying or shattering imagery to reinvent or exorcize life.
The path of academically trained painter Dennis ‘Sio’ Montera initially led him through a Realist-inspired phase of creating from nature before the artist found his own pictorial language while in graduate school from 2001-2004. The following year he came back to Cebu City armed with a Masters degree in painting and mounted two important and succeeding solo exhibitions on abstract art at the Art Center of SM City Cebu and at the Bluewater Gallery of Maribago Bluewater Beach Resort. The two shows were not only well received by critics and collectors but brought to the community a fresh take on serious visual art. The artist together with only a very few Cebuano painters have taken a road less travelled by other artists in exploring the non-objective realm in mainstream art practice. The artist takes inspiration from numerous painters the like of Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, Jean Michel Basquiat, Antoni Tapies from the west and Nestor Vinluan, Lao Lianben, and Jose Joya from the Philippines. The artistic style of these painters thrills the artist and leads him to undertake his own experiments with materials, tools, and effects.
Sio Montera began to mix industrial materials with the conventional artist’s paints where he was successful in integrating his diverse resources into a convincing overall composition. His canvasses are condensed into massive, encrusted color-filled paintings of either gestural lines or scratched surfaces. The lines created in his gestural works often resemble coagulated ink blots that glide from one corner to the other with total abandon and freedom. The scratched/scraped picture plane is the most recent reinvention of the artist’s style and the indentations on the surface of the paintings function like individual graffiti, the artist set of personal coded references inscribed on the work’s ground like hardened symbols or signs.
In this latest exhibition, the artist metaphorically combines artistic production with immediate experiences of his human existence. Each of the works creates an overall effect that is based from the language of the artist’s soul and is considered by him as emblems and symbolic indications of his presence in this short life. These new installment of Sio Montera’s work has also taken distance from the linear logic of adults to arrive at the impulsive logic of children. The created visual field reassures flatness that is both direct and embracing typical of the spontaneity inherent in the spur-of-the-moment, scribble drawings. They represent for him an extraordinary mirror for multiplying or shattering imagery to reinvent or exorcize life.
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