FLATBED STORIES

Gerardo Tan
Flatbed Stories
until 8 September 2007

Where does object end and image begin? How does the visual reproduce itself? Flatbed Stories, an exhibition of Gerardo Tan's recent paintings rendered in oil on canvas, discreetly engages the viewer in such queries. Using collage-based works, Tan explores processes involving the mechanical and manual replication of images and demonstrates how these can extend to a seemingly endless stream.


In Flatbed Stories, Tan sources images for his paintings from collages comprised of exhibit invitations and promotional posters for recent art shows. These materials were gathered in the span of two weeks and then made into collages: a jarring disarray of composite images constructed and cropped, juxtaposed at random, stained with spilled paint, and assembled into a whole composition. The artist then captures digital images of these collages through a flatbed scanner, producing full-color prints which are utilized as visual references for his paintings. Tan later on intends to take digital photographs of the existing paintings in the mag:net show, reproduce these as printed images and use the products as materials for yet another set of collages.

For an artist such as Tan, who has been producing collage-based works since 1990 and explored various facets of installation art, engaging in this process seems to be a gesture of reflexivity. It becomes an act of self-reference made possible by mechanically reproducing the visual, ad infinitum. For instance, the invitations and posters used source materials for Tan's first “batch” of collages are in themselves (mostly) digital images of existing works by other contemporary artists. By using these as sources for his works, Tan intentionally refers to past exhibitions that he visited during a defined span of time and consciously redirects the visual information back to his own works. The ensuing process of building collages are both manual and technological interventions that “reclassify” Tan's recollections of the shows that he visited, constructing a continuum of time and space from the fragmented icons associated with these.

Tan's intentional “in-breeding” or evolution of images does not stop with the Flatbed Stories show: if all goes well as intended, the entire process of visual configuration and replication that the artist initiated with his collages may extend to other sites, contexts, and occasions.

Flatbed Images will be on view up to September 8 (Saturday), 2007 at Mag:net Gallery, located at the AGCOR Building 335 Katipunan Avenue (fronting Miriam and Ateneo), Quezon City. For more inquiries please call 9293191 or visit www.magnet.com.ph.