New Paintings and other Stuff
Poklong Anading
Roberto Chabet
Pardo De Leon
Jet Melencio,
MM Yu

25 October – 12 November 2005
Mag:net Gallery ABS
Curated by Roberto Chabet

Everyday life surreptitiously lend surreal appeal to the art of the everyday. It’s in a joke, a punchline that one realizes the moral of a probable story. For this exhibit New Paintings and Other Stuff opening at the Magnet this 25th of October is this much passed around anecdotal joke within the circuits of mobile phones which Roberto Chabet, the show’s curator, claims to be the show’s subtitle :

“Amo : Chalk ‘to para mamatay ang ipis. Gamitin mo sa pader  (This chalk is for killing roaches. Use it on a wall.)
Maid :  Yes, Ati.
Sumunod na araw nagulat ang amo sa nakita niya sa pader :
(The next day, the senora was dumbfounded by what she saw on the wall -)
               ‘ IPIS MAMATAY KAYONG LAHAT!’   “
               (DIE YOU ROACHES!)

The wall as a zone of painting seeks to profit from the way cave paintings were once practiced or so devised as to imbibe or effect a vicarious power over one which wishes to dispel or overcome. The naivete is knowingly possessed by the maid here whose name surely is DADA as she takes an absurd conceptualist attitude, where and whence painting, art, meets the stuff of life and life meets the stuff of art.

With works from Poklong Anading, Pardo De Leon, Jet Melencio, MM Yu and Chabet himself, the show hobbles to a certain literary and pictorial literalness, plying into concepts of diminishment implied in scale and subject as seen in Anading’s repetition of frames within frames de-escalating into a pyramid, or as inversely depicted in Melencio’s macro photographs of lint, dust mites – objects barely visible to the eye;  or that which flounders into slight escapism as in De Leon’s predominantly red painting attenuating psychic jaunts and or Yu’s relentless drips that
seemingly go nowhere but the flatness of the canvas. The works summarily define states but defy it by their thingness, blunting whatever they may wring of higher perspicacity for after all they are but the stuff of mundane consequences revved up for sole musing. And the meaning gets lost anyway in too much theorizing. )

New Paintings and Other Stuff’s opening cocktails will be at 6:30 PM. The show will run until November 12, 2005.
Mag:net Gallery ABS is at the Loop ELJ Comm, Center, ABS-CBN CompoundEugenio Lopez Jr., St., Quezon City Or call 410-0995 email magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com.ph