Mag:net Gallery ABS
1- 15 January 2006
view paintings

Mag:net Gallery Paseo
1- 30 January 2006
view paintings

Mag:net Gallery Katipunan
1- 30 January 2006
view paintings

CR Gallery at Mag:net Café Katipunan
1- 15 January 2006
view paintings

Rock Drilon Paintings in Simultaneous Exhibitions

Jumpstarting Mag:net’s calendar for 2006 is an exhibition by Rock Drilon of paintings and drawings spanning 20 years of his artistic practice. These paintings, mostly done in acrylic were the accumulated outpourings, testaments, koans spun from the multiple neurons of thoughts and emotional states anteceding actual personal events, however indirectly, or from spontaneous outbursts of creativity. Rather diaristic, the show charts Drilon’s departures and returns to specific forms and motifs he has inadvertently used in most of his works. One of which is the spiraling serpentine knot that may be traced to the earliest painting included in the show. One in a series of paintings done in 1986, ‘No. 56’ is a hydra spawned out of a box, blooming in its green iridescence, with its ends though stumped, seemingly lurching on deceptively benign. Through the years these hydra forms have become ominous, intertwining with other forms of colored planes, anamorphic geometric solids and axes, organic brain-like tubings and gourds. In some, these are contrasted by short brisk strokes, feathering in luminous swathes of white suggesting shedding and stripping over splattered and blotched patches that are to Dubuffet “impressions of teeming matter evocative of all kinds of indeterminate textures, including galaxies and nebulae.”

All however evoke movement, more than its arbitrary layered composition, but also in the diverse application of paint, contrasted by their channeled energy with which Drilon sparks each one. Further, he associates the way he paints as like dancing in so far as he moves around the canvas, picking up pace or dallying through the slow waltz of a sweeping stroke. Hence, “Dance” which is painted directly on the walls of the cramped CR Gallery of Mag:net Café in Katipunan, is Drilon’s ballet of solitary creation.

However reconfigured these recurrent themes are in his works, the idea of a Gordian knot persistently wound and unwound, rings true of the painter’s endless struggle with the idea of creation which is as primordial as the universe itself.

Drilon’s painting’s are simultaneously on view at all Mag:net galleries - until January 15 at Mag:net Gallery ABS at the Loop, ABS-CBN, ELJ Compound, Mother Ignacia Avenue, Quezon City; until January 30 at the Mag:net Gallery Paseo, Paseo Center, Paseo de Roxas, Makati City; until January 30 at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan, Quezon City; and until January 15 at the CR Gallery at Mag:net Café, Katipunan.

For further details please call Jhennie at 9293191; 4352631 or email magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com.ph or visit www.magnet.com.ph

Rock Drilon