3X
Group Show
Pablo Biglang-awa
Alfred Cruz
Jucar Raquepo
Mag:net Gallery ABS
8 – 31 December 2005
Curated by Nilo Ilarde


3X, the group show by Pablo Biglang-awa, Alfred Cruz and Jucar Raquepo opening at The Mag:net at The Loop on December 8 coheres to a certain sleek graphic quality commonly seen in the art being produced today as it is almost touted as the style de rigueur opposed to the grandness of the painterly hand. Yet both tendencies ceaselessly question or strive to answer the elusive riddle of “why create ?, or “why still paint?” much more so when it seems that everything has been done. As for 3 being a prime number and X as an algebraic constant unknown, the show pries to an exactness that can be achieved mathematically, logically or as can possibly be carried out by the most advanced technology.

This is most apparent in Cruz’s paintings – rigid, formal, foregoing effects to derive at what to him is the most essential, yet complex in foregrounding the dichotomies of pictoriality or even reality for that matter. Although, the bareness is very reminiscent of much constructivist and hard-edge abstractionist paintings, Cruz rather resorts to a certain sloganeering of these aforementioned movements’ attempts to an absolute picture. This we see in his use of zero in designating the concept of infinity, the number 1 as a finite entity, the cross-hairs for a target, red and yellow bands for oppositional directions, and the question mark as the summation of this questioning that needn’t be answered really. It is a mere process one undergoes when faced with an empty plane, or like being lost in both the bounty and vacuity of signs. Cruz says these paintings took off from an earlier work,” A Hole Is A Thing In A Thing It Is Not”, a large mirror placed on the floor, on its surface were various color photographs of views reflected back by the same mirror. This work is being both clear and unclear, utterly contradicting the authenticity of each manifestations of platonic realms of reality – the symbolic or the merely representational and the physical or what is represented, a quaint demonstration of Orwellian doublethink (1984) which is

“ ….to know and not to know. . .. . .. to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, . . . . . and above all to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

But this process somehow becomes more complicated in this variegated world of signs, some signs being taken more for the thing itself, as a photo or a painting being an object, yet what’s on it merely repeats a dozen or so signs readily available. Or can a certain type of painting be defined by what it isn’t, by what it can’t be, as the case between what is representational and what is abstract?

But reality is actually contradictory and that is what symbols do – synthesize these contradictions into one consensual image as how symbolists of the 19 th century have used these symbols in their works. Overtime, it was reduced to a mere style, décor, effects, pattern, motif repeated in posters, furniture, textile – hence emptied out of its initial signification, yet they retain traces of what it represented – decadence, excess, fantasy, the ideal life meant to be aspired for – endlessly pining for it, invoking such ideal through its symbols.

Jucar Raquepo’s fascination with hobby auto detailing seem to bring him back to the arts and crafts movement of William Morris who preached an art of function, independent of history and a zealousness to craftsmanship where its satisfaction is derived from its own production. Although his referent elements are the logos and emblems of car culture, he maintains that his appropriation of such is quite satiric of abstract art especially of the likes of Judd, Newman, Stella – both minimalist and hard edge abstractionists, i.e. racing stripes as opposed to zips, checkered flag patterns as to flat color fields.

The idea of extreme excess, “over exhibition attitude of car shows” or as exemplified by the fascination for the bling-blings of pimping one’s car is blatantly demonstrated in one work where Raquepo has attached car speakers, amplifiers, a dvd player, a TV monitor, toys, converters, blinking lights on velcros, small spotights and metal tubings, wires and blue neon lights, and accompanied by a  video playing an “animation of a painting's various shapes in fast motions, like in a traffic or a racing”. In some he mixes both sheen and shabbiness in using plastics and simulating effects of hot rod flames and speed drips producing a crude-like incompleteness much seen in painterly paintings and whence also favored by craftsmen shunning machine-like impeccability. Moreover, by such he also expresses the qualifying tag of a painting, one that is solely regarded for its own aesthetics and clearly of no utility except as wall hanger. This much parallels the exercise and custom of auto detailers in creating highly polished model cars that are not meant to be driven but solely for exhibition, to be of concours quality. By such leveling he proposes by his works that painting is décor and nothing more, and that abstraction may be made as mere motif for such purpose. Hence, they are products that may take on the same properties and qualities of any other object made, and that the idea of abstraction may have cease to be but a mere ideation recalled by its own motifs. To regard and differentiate all others for history’s sake, is a race begetting the end game of a fool’s circle.

Pablo Biglang-awa’s triptych, for its superlative slick and posh however collapses much the boundaries of design, logo, motif and meaning – as both personal and corporate ids surface in a surfeit of signs made-up and appropriated for one’s own means. Consider such as the upper left panel is composed of a detail of a female torso wearing a bikini bottom appropriated from a manga illustration, its lower left panel is a composite of Sylvester's hand grasping a rubber bone against a laser blast explosion from the anime Akira and where it was used in a previous show "False Relation". The right panel shows the big bang blast scene from the same seminal anime, at its lower part is a swimming pool handle taken from a personal photo from some island escapade and where it was again used in a previous show, “In The Shadow of Memory”. In the middle panel are the logolized words KISS, STRIP, BANG – a mixture of photoshop typefaces and images recycled from his past shows such as the silhouetted shoes and the Bugs Bunny crown, the loudspeaker from a wingding typeface.

Evidently Pop as Ruscha or as Koons or even as Rosenquist especially in the medium used – acrylic which affords preciseness in delineating flat areas and the erasure of the totemic brush stroke, and the appeal to a chic seduction. Yet it’s vaguely romanticist, recalling Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze in reclaiming a brilliance lost, an allegory for such yearning, as aside from the flatness and highly decorated surface with which it has presaged art movements leaning towards the abstract (i.e. De Stijl, Art Noveau) although much of it is derived from Japonisme and the craft of nihon ga of floating pictures.

Ephemerality, another constituent of much of Pop, vaunts itself as well in the digital acclimatization of our visual culture, consequently what was generally accepted as history. It is compressed and collapsed as Takahashi Murakami philosophizes as a culture composite of mere database. Thus, realness is subsumed for its super replica, i.e. the pixilated version of our memory becomes as malleable as a gaming character, or as like an eroticism that is mildly lukewarm, wry, a phallus petticoated by a lot of rubber. The difference between high brow and low brow is leveled off as a superflat image and thus becomes a painting or a work of no genre.

But for Biglang-awa, his Kiss, Strip, Bang maybe an encapsulation of the cyclical tendencies of images – to symbolical teleological décor to readymade objects freely appropriated for its referents, all exploding into one dynamic of these push and pull. Eventually they endure as “The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore thunder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture.” (Gertrude Stein)

3X’s opening cocktails will be at 6:30 PM . The show will run until December 31, 2005 .

Mag:net Gallery ABS is at the Loop ELJ Comm, Center, ABS-CBN Compound Eugenio Lopez Jr., St. , Quezon City . Or call 410-0995 email magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com.ph