Infant Eyes

Cris Villanueva will be opening his third one man show Infant Eyes at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan on April 6. 2006. Featured are works that are slight departures from his obsessively rendered pieces of ‘bubble wrapped’ paintings that double as trompe l’oleil cheats of actual wrapped paintings or erased chalkboard panels. In some, he adds tears and rips, peels of packing tapes adding more to the illusion of these paintings’ object-ness/ objecthood.

This time he plays on patterns of camouflage, whitening them over, leaving only thin strips, isolating individual shapes, contriving block letters to peek through the design. This concealment also serves as a double negative, of layered concealments – camouflage fabric over wood, white paint over camouflage.

In one work he has articulated the camouflage patterns into isolated shaped canvases painted white. Hung directly on the wall, they seem to emerge from the surface.

In another piece, a rectangular panel with the edges slightly sawed off, repeats the gross grain pattern of the wood fiber panel underneath it.

This obsession/ fascination with patterns, intricate and otherwise redundant scrupulousness may be pointed to a regimented life in the ad agency where he has worked for 8 years as art director and to a brief adventure with collegiate military training. Repeating patterns, methods as by habit affords one to be recomposed in a meditative stance, to doing without thinking, to make the painting as a natural gesture of the hand or the wrist.

Villanueva’s method of concealment parallels the way someone perceives a newly acquired environment, as like a baby would see the world for the first time. One sees what’s there but remains unrecognizable as has not been taught what those things are.

Cris Villanueva was recently awarded the Grand Prize for the Philip Morris Art Awards for this year.


(Cris Villanueva Infant Eyes will be on view at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan from 6 to 29 April 2006. For inquiry please contact 929-3191 (Malou) or email magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com.ph)