Long Goodbye

Group Show – Poklong Anading, Lena Cobangbang, Alfred Cruz, Bembol Dela Cruz, Rain Dial, Nilo Ilarde, Paolo Martinez, Jet Melencio, Jonathan Olazo, Jayson Oliveria, Gary Ross Pastrana, Jucar Raquepo, Italo Tajo, Alvin Villaruel, MM Yu

20 June – 8 July 2006
Magnet Gallery Katipunan
Curated by Roberto Chabet

View Artworks

Opening at Mag:net Katipunan is Long Goodbye, a show, at the same time a proposition to a long reaching farewell “to modernism and its promised utopias, to history in the age of anti-history, and to art itself in the age of anti-art.” Curated by Roberto Chabet, the show conflates disparate disciplines and attacks of the ff : artists - Poklong Anading, Lena Cobangbang, Alfred Cruz, Bembol Dela Cruz, Rain Dial, Nilo Ilarde, Paolo Martinez, Jet Melencio, Jonathan Olazo, Jayson Oliveria, Gary Ross Pastrana, Jucar Raquepo, Italo Tals, Alvin Villaruel, and MM Yu to such a proposition entangling technology to the kind of world view each one has entailed and intrigued, vis-à-vis art movements, specifically geometric abstraction that’s predicated on the view of “the world (as) an apple”, moreover an apple that has been quartered (in order to eat it better), as according to Andre Masson who attributes much of this to Cezanne, faulted for the sage of his advice to see nature as cones, as spheres, as cylinders, nearly rid of all sentimental hogging, detached from all angles. Hence, to be an art aspiring to be wholistic and universal, to be perfection achieved by rational methods. These are evoked in a certain objectivity teetering between literal factualness and didactic solipsism in the trompe l’oleil paintings of Rainier dela Cruz of measuring tools and the pseudo-scientific canvases of Alvin Villaruel, as well as in Paolo Martinez’s translation of movement into sound; in the routine seriality of Al Cruz’s clock painting replete with iconic primaries standing for the seconds, minutes and hours; the disparaging differences between theory and practice in Jucar Raquepo’s photo-realist painting of MMDA art-emblazoned walls; the failed articulation of assembly-line puzzle pieces of miniature furniture sets of Lena Cobangbang; as a summoning symbol of both the divine and the banal, the essential and the base in Jayson Oliveria’s mish mash of oil pigments engulfing an inverted pentagram; in the metaphysical painting experiments of Poklong Anading of a painting in perpetual transformation, among others featured in this show. These are no more encapsulated further in Jonathan Olazo’s work of utter self-reference which either deflates or esteems the institutionalization of art history or rather a sole painter’s influence consequently into a movement all its own but which are invariably borne from one’s “narcissism… delusion, perversion, dedication, fantasy, absurdity”, the vicissitudes of artistic creation haunted by the “phantom pain” of modernism. We see this best, not as an apple though rotted now to the core, but as Jet Melencio’s reconstruction of a long running joke without a punch line about an enigmatic pink table.

Long Goodbye will have its opening cocktails on June 20 at 6: 30 PM . It will be on view until July 8, 2006 .

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