Eventual Unravelings
A review of Rock Drilon's Recent Paintings at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan
by Lisa Ito

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As a visual form and metaphor, the line references energy, the flow of life, and the progression of events. In artist Rock Drilon's recent paintings, the presence of line and its undulations into loops, circles, and masses signifies an entire journey into the eventual unraveling of self.

A tracing of the lines in Drilon's show of works rendered in acrylic on canvas, entitled Recent Paintings, reveals a progression that, if interpreted in the light of psychological analysis, charts the unwinding and journeying of forms, perhaps the artist's unintended symbol for his internal sojourns, across an expanse of space.

Selective Memory, for instance, is a diptych relaying Drilon's personal attempt to decipher self and lay down visual references for assessing the events of his personal life. As the title implies, the artist does not engage in a strictly chronological accounting of everything that has happened since birth, but rather systematically filters recollections of events that have shaped, strengthened, or scarred him through the decades.

This particular painting is Drilon's visual translation of biography psychology, a healing technique used to draw out recurring and unresolved experiences–motifs of conflict, so to speak. But instead of recollecting the past through words, Drilon uses visual references to situate deeply-personal musings into context, in order to see how they fit into the entire puzzle of life. After scribbling cathartic passages on canvas, the artist obscures the text with abstract forms, covering the entire work with personal symbols.

Drilon's attempt to chart the personal may be gleaned from the main motifs of the work, which includes numbers arranged beside parallel lines or planes, similar to the lines of a writing pad or the unfolding expanse of a staircase. The undulating and sequential flow of numerals from one (1) to fifty (50) marks the artist's attempts at accounting for the passage of his personal life. The numbers subtly shift in hue as the numerical progression increases: from bright orange at the very start, to red, maroon, violet, blue, turquoise, and gold. The color shifts are likewise signifiers of how the artist views each respective phase. Other forms in the work, such as open-ended and recurring loops treading the expanse of space.

The way the lines of Drilon's paintings entangle in circular journeys speak of internal contradictions. The way the artist's forms loop in a sweeping, all-encompassing way in the work Selective Memory, for instance, is far different from the way they all converge in other paintings in the show, such as the series titled Untitled 1, 2, and 3. According to the artist, these were among a series of paintings produced in Brooklyn, New York, where he stayed for a brief hiatus last year. Situated inconspicuously at the periphery of the gallery's wall, the small-scale paintings are variations on a single image: a continuous line looped up and bunching into a single entanglement. The tangled and winding forms in dismal hues point to literal allusions beneath the mass of convolutions. This motif is repeated in the exposed sketch lines beneath the forms, jutting out like thorns piercing the pale rose backgrounds of the works.

The rest of the paintings in the show demonstrates the artist's cognizance of the peripheral, how the seemingly dispensable or easily overlooked is privileged over the evident. Orange Line, for instance, derives its title from a sliver of tangerine in a sea of turquoise and milkish white filling the canvas. Yellow Line is a diptych which derives its title from, in a plane predominantly filled with black, grey, and blue forms, a deliberate canary line that seemingly passes off as a random or an insignificant part of the complex painting.

Red Line, similarly, reinforces the veiled irony between the title's text and the images painted on canvas. The literal referent of this work's title, too, is similarly situated at the very periphery of the painting: a gaunt, vertical scarlet slash lost in a galaxy of floating and expansive forms, like a lacerated wound on the verge of bleeding.

These works, taken as a whole, are subtle reminders of formal and personal contradictions. The metaphors in Recent Paintings, however, are deeply and intimately personal ones that may not be readily evident to viewers unacquainted with the artist. The veneer of detachment is likewise reinforced by the straightforward and seemingly impersonal title of the show and the simple titles of the works.

The show, after all the scrutiny, is an affirmation of how abstraction articulates the personal. It demonstrates how either the studied or spontaneous composition of forms creates concrete images of the inchoate and complex mass of subjectivities brimming beneath skin.

(Rock Drilon’s Recent Paintings will be on view at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan fro 13 to 31 March 2006. For inquiry please contact 929-3191 (Malou) or email magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com.ph)