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Jucar Raquepo
Abstract Thought Towards Emphatic Thought
t7  - 28 February 2006
Mag:net Gallery Paseo 

Progress is commonly associated with innovation, the new, an optimistic view of the future, a metropolis run with precise efficiency. Hence, it is an absolute aim continually aspired for and which all seeming totalitarian states deem to deliver for its citizens. Accordingly, it’s what the Futurists have built hymns unto – to herald the march of modernity, the mechanization of industries, a complete revolution for new pictorial imagery aggrandizing speed, sleekness, movement, the glimmer of invention, the thunder of motors,  above all.  It is for such reason that Jucar  Raquepo alludes his recent works to as he returns to the familiar theme of ‘abstractionist hobby detailing’, if there ever is a term, in his exhibit Abstract Thought Towards Emphatic Thought opening at the Mag:net Paseo on February 7, 2006.  

Scraplings of hot rod flames, racing stripes, checked flag patterns and car logos are crashed in once again with iconic idioms of abstract painting and repeated in some as though they are clip art types that can be stuck anytime anywhere like stickers, like tattoos, beyond making like a hobby-detailer-enthusiast scaling down Stella, Albers, Mondrian, Klee, Kandinsky, Newman, etc. to a strategic area of Raquepo’s painting surface that is characteristically strident and whimsical, unevenly polished, retaining a certain handcrafted-ness of the practice. Pointedly, this also coincides with the much appraised bravura of a master stroke gleaned in globs of thick, impastoed paint. Hence the proverbial Pollock is stripped, arabesqued and/or pared down to a corner amongst the Morris Louis and a Giacomo Balla as seen in one work entitled Back in Black.  It is no mere coincidence either that the Balla painting he has appropriated for such is entitled Speeding Automobil. 

The parallelisms set by Raquepo between car culture and Futurism is intended for the way they both rallied for the so-called “superior essence of progress” marked “by its major symbols: the car and its speed” and which for the most part, as especially in car magazines, an unabashed call to mannish heroics. The macho myth of abstract expressionism can not helped be tainted with it as well.  

Yet this conflation is not mere satire nor reactionary. It may just as well be a matter-of-factness on Raquepo’s view of his environment, including the weight of history of his practice as a painter which are mostly founded on books and other published materials, a case, a moment now where “ we already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed” (F.T.Marinetti) – hence, a surface where time and space has been flattened, and where corporate logos, TV station IDs, web interfaces, neon signs, MMDA color blocks are ever more ominous than the sun, stars and clouds. That with this conflagration of signs, the signification between merely aesthetic and solely utilitarian closes in in this critical age. Appropriation renders the search for new pictorial imagery a struggle indeed.

Abstract Thought Towards Emphatic Thought will have its opening cocktails at 6PM. 

This exhibit will be on view until February 28, 2006. 

Mag:net Gallery Paseo is at the ground Floor of Paseo Center, Paseo de Roxas Avenue corner Sedeno Street, Makati City. For inquiries please call 817- 7895 or email magnetplus@gmail.com or magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com or join magnetcafe@yahoogroups.com.