Mirages by ALLAN BALISI
Alan Balisi's "Mirages" at SLab Gallery features
large format monochromatic paintings of jarring lyrical images cinematic in their
aplomb suspense that explore the phantasmagoria of uncertain meaning
melancholic over fictional ends.
The paintings: A man looks perplexed over a book with blank
pages. He is permeated with a foreboding existential horror creeping into
the core of his beliefs that maybe there is only nothing. A woman sits by
the bedside with a gesture that she is talking over the phone, and yet this is
uncertain because the picture seems incomplete with certain details blurred
beyond recognition. She becomes literally a mirage that parallels the fictional
capacity of picture making to embellish reality. A piece of cloth fluttering in
the wind reaches the height of the moment when it touches the peak of the
mountain, apparently, making a shape that resemble the much rigid bigger mass.
A visual pun connecting two seemingly similar forms but each having different
content, paradoxical but true, that resembles the flattened reality of
painting. A group of young men are jubilant in their celebration of the next.
The word "end' hangs above their heads, creating ambivalent connections of
what the picture could mean in terms of finality, which also opens it up to
various fictive possibilities.
The culture of copies does bring many questions pertaining
to the nature of how we perceive and interpret reality. From painting's
standpoint, some things can be taken out, or maximized to effect, without
losing grip of reality held by outward impressions, but allowing the mind to
take control of the interpretation of reality as opposed to relinquishing it
over to what the eye can normally see. Alan Balisi manipulates the picture
deftly like a narrator who tests the limits of our attention, to challenge our
notions of reality, that is, if we can still believe what we see, given the
fact that all things appear normal. Perhaps this is still what makes painting
credible, not so much because of its capacity to create an illusion, but
rather, with the way it can transform semblances of the real into replicas with
a negative aura - the other that would critique the actual. Reorganization,
repetition, revision, and patterning of internal components are characteristics
of a language that can make familiar utterances into a unique individual style.
This idiosyncratic stylization becomes essential especially within a practice
such as painting that through time has become compacted with various modes of
expression, which in itself makes it such a unique language different from
other mediums of representation. Resemblances have become mere appearances, like
the real that repeats itself everyday without alteration of our cognition of it
and yet life essentially is different from day to day depending on how we live
it, in how we use it to each of our own purpose. Alan Balisi's works had shown
us that through a touch of ironic humor, mystery, poetic reflection, and
melancholic introspection, that the language of painting facilitates critical
attention more than its mere appearance.
Mirages by ALLAN BALISI opens on 10 January 2013
simultaneously with Conversation 17 by CORINNE DE SAN JOSE & Site of Marks
by ERIC ZAMUCO. All shows run until 9 February 2013 at Silverlens at 2/F YMC
Bldg., II, 2320 Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati
Gallery hours are Monday to Friday from 10am to 7pm and
Saturdays from 1 to 6pm.
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