CONVERSATIONS: POPO SAN PASCUAL AND ROCELI VALENCIA
October 15- November 6, 2011
Upstairs Gallery
Conversation and exchange build the foundations of lasting friendship. Years of personal engagement often create profound relationships of enjoyment, trust and respect. When the personal is merged with the professional, these connections can sow the seeds for ideas and projects in new and unexpected ways. Conversations, by artists Popo San Pascual and Roceli Valencia, aims to reveal this very process based upon their seventeen years of friendship. Throughout this time they have shared long talks that span the grand themes of love, life, family, and philosophy to the everyday aspects of their shared love of gardening and Tagatay, where they both live. As visual practitioners, this has, inevitably, also included long discussions on the nature of their creative practices and the state of art itself.
Seizing the opportunity to visualise their relationship, they present a selection of collaborative and individual works. Although San Pascual has been consistently painting, whilst Valencia has been on hiatus from her practice for many years until quite recently, the former has taken an interest in absorbing and responding to the work of his more senior peer and mentor. For their collaboration Valencia presents San Pascual with incomplete works for him to intervene and contribute to her aesthetic; working in secrecy, the completed version is only unveiled to her on opening night. Concurrently, they both contribute individual works illustrating how their styles converge and diverge creatively. Sharing an intuitive and emotive approach to practice, each plays with medium, colour and space to create lyrical figurative and abstract images in this unusual stream of shared consciousness.
