Postmodernism is not a new beginning, only the aftermath of modernism. The New Figuration is post-postmodern because it strives to realize an entirely non-modernist and non-postmodernist paradigm.
The New Figuration in Philippine Contemporary Art respects tradition and has its feet firmly planted in the now outdated postmodernism - it integrates styles and manners of painting, that were developed and refined in the centuries preceding modernism. This New Figuration has its feet firmly planted in modernism since it thinks the work of art should be an aesthetically integrated, coloristical and compositional self-contained unit.
The word “figurative” is problematic. Who isn’t figurative now? Post-modernity seems to have unleashed a torrent of images into the world.
In this group exhibition, the artists need to demonstrate a tiny little bit of intellectual rigour in their definition of the word. There has for some time been a tendency to use the word pejoratively. This show will reinforce that tendency..
The New Figuration, however, can not fall into the intellectually conceited simplemindedness of concept art, nor the aestetically confused roomdecorations of installation art. The reason for this is simple: we are trying to express that which transcends concepts. A new, post-postmodern, figuration must be anti-narrative and anti-discursive.
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