unlearning and relearning to see
Rinne Abrugena
Kristoffer Ardena
Iabadiou Piko
OPENING:
Saturday, September 14, 2019, 6 pm
EXHIBITION DATA:
September 14 to October 12, 2019
1335MABINI, Makati City, 14 September 2019
The process of image-making usually intersects between the reality and the perceived truth of the artist. Popular modern philosophical views claim that the brain lacks the ability to contain images. Hence, our sense of the world must have come from the way we deem how physical things occupy spaces. ‘unlearning and relearning to see’ gathers the works of three artists and their environment, which merge the fastened images of scenes and the layers of complexity wherein these settings were found. Here, the artists integrate themselves among the places, sites, and ‘unlearning and relearning to see’ spaces of their art practices. The exhibition considers our own interventions into the realities that we often witness since what we see and what we know are always shaped by the social and natural conditions that were set in our usual surroundings. Thus, we find images charged with dynamism and sophisticated narratives of what we obtain from the daily mise-en-scéne.
Rinne Abrugena’s paintings are filled with large and broad strokes that visually translate her investigation of the human psyche. Propelled by a background in education and a keen interest in literature, Abrugena transmits fragmented parts of her inquiry through the gravitating display of depth, which rests among her intense use of colors and lines. In this exhibition, the artist leaves us only with a loose interpretation of the world, reeling us in so that we may find ourselves amid the clarity the images command.
Heavily influenced by the spontaneity of abstraction, Iabadiou Piko’s works attempt to deal with how emotional responses of the body are visually released. Here, the artist draws from random fragments of a place and arranges them in a way that reflects the artist’s relationship with his environment ---personal conjuncture and trajectories that provide views of how a person navigates a space and how he chooses to remember it.
Kristoffer Ardeña’s Ghost Painting (cracked category) series surveys how geography and socio-political factors influence the way images are created and made. Painting over re-appropriated Katrina fabric and tarpaulin (materials that have cultural and yet utilitarian significance in the Philippine context), Ardeña forms new images by allowing the work to disintegrate under the heat of the sun along with the humidity present in the location of the Philippines in a tropical region. Such interference of the process in art-making suggests how the images we create are predetermined by several components brought by the characteristics of a place.
words by Gwen Bautista
