A Master of Marbles
Caña’s Kaleidoscope World 2
August 17, 2010 at Artes Orientes, Serendra
A lot of Caña’s boyhood was spent staring into marbles. Fascinated by the perfect roundness of the tiny glass spheres, he would take a peek at the world around him with a marble serving as lens for seeing reflections of distinct shapes, objects and vistas. To him, the simple toy becomes a viewfinder, serving slices of reality in arcs and half-moons to his curious sight.
It is this juvenile fascination that developed into Caña’s distinct painting style, with the flat ground of his canvas peppered with minimal textural effects broken by the half-spheres and crescents that touch and overlap, giving varying gradations of transparency to the rendering of his subjects. A still life of fruits on a table becomes a salad of lights and shadows, with slices of lusciousness seemingly melding into each other while laid on white fabric.
“You may say that the marble is the springboard to my art. I like breaking the canvas into fragments; curves resembling Cs and Ds give me an exhilarating experience of breaking the norm. This is of course, inspired by the shape of the marble, and I like sharing that view—a lot of smooth arcs, no sharp edges that jar the perspective.”
Caña, also known as Franklin Valencia, an advertising hotshot for more than two decades in a past life, is closing his first decade as a full-time painter. Since participating in Saturday Group exhibitions and setting his marbled sights on taking his art more seriously, he has counted plenty of successful shows as feathers on his cap, even emerging as Artist of the Year as lauded by Art Manila magazine in 2002 for his first solo salvo. Now in Kaleidoscope World 2, his fifth one-man exhibition, he offers viewers a fresh glimpse into his vibrant, hue-imbued playground.
Bright colors, familiar sights, and positive energy make up Caña’s latest offering, staying true to the definition of a kaleidoscope as a tool used to observe beautiful forms. There is no effort to limit the works into a single theme. Caña shows an array of beloved subjects mixed together, presenting various shades and arbitrary patterns. The viewer can almost imagine these visions as seen from a looking glass of sliced light, presenting saturations and dilutions where the arcs intersect.
Has he lost his marbles? Apparently not. He is very much grounded in reality. His pieces serve as a prism of varying themes, from a happy sampaguita vendor in Last Piece with a quiet sense of accomplishment, to the sensual curves of a blue vase holding a generous profusion of flowers in Gentle Charm. His Fence not only serves as a visual barrier to a garden beyond the viewer’s perception, it also presents the variegated character of textured wooden slats, much like a set of musical keys striking different chords. A Bamboo Forest of eight auspicious stalks reach up to the sky, models of resilience and flexibility, blessed by hope in the form of glowing flares.
Notable in the exhibition are Caña’s Barung-Barong and Grace, testaments to the artist’s past, growing up in the congested Kamuning community after relocating from his native coastal town of Calauag, Quezon. He interprets makeshift shanties with dignity, beauty and a multicolored chaos of patterns and paint strokes, looked upon by the radiance of a crescent moon. God appears in a stance of blessing and sacrifice, a luminous figure in open arms of love, comfort and nurturing. “I believe that He is always with us, watching over us. God is always closest to his poorest and most helpless creatures. Faith is not a monopoly of the rich, because the impoverished need Him more,” the artist discloses.
The boy who used to look into marbles seeing play and reverie has grown up into a man who realizes in them stylized reflections of inspired devotion and illumination. Within the squared-off borders of Caña’s canvas in Kaleidoscope World 2, there is no space for gloom, only brightness and light distinguished by an artist’s sight.
Kaleidoscope World 2 opens August 17, 2010 at six thirty in the evening in Artes Orientes, 2nd level, the Retail Shops at Serendra, Bonifacio Global City. The exhibit runs until August 27. For more details, please contact the gallery at 8569047 or 09175230877 and visit artesorientes.multiply.com.
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