Art creates time that exists outside of the world’s temporality. It recreates memories. It meditates on what is. It dreams of the future.

Written by Amanda Juico Dela Cruz. Images courtesy of the galleries.
March 23, 2023

Art creates time that exists outside of the world’s temporality. It recreates memories. It meditates on what is. It dreams of the future. The artists featured this month plays with time in their works as they go back, stay in the present, and time travel to the future to relive moments of bliss, critique social reality, prepares for the afterlife, and hope that life would emerge from death.

Chinnich Candao and Bea Policarpio, “Daughters of the Sea”, Arte Bettina.

Above: first two on the left are works of Chinnich Candao, 2 paintings on the right by Bea Policarpio

Pablo Neruda penned a poem with imageries of the power of the ocean and the bounty of the earth, alluding to the woman he dearly loved. His rich use of metaphors inspired Chinnich Candao and Bea Policarpio to reminisce on their equally inexhaustible memories of the sea. Candao goes back to the the waters of Mindanao. Inaul patterns are tucked within the waves on her canvas making her paintings a tribute to her Maguindanaoan roots. Policarpio travels to the southern coast of France. She mimics the power of the Mediterranean sea, its limitless sky, and its renewing sunsets and sunrises.

Arel Zambarrano, “Arisgado”, Art Cube Gallery.

With elements found in construction sites, the works are a social realist and existential portrayal of the everyday struggles of the laborers whom the artist worked with as an architect. The portraits of his nine trusted laborers are the centerpiece of the show. Their faces are painted in the background while a push-pull tape is woven in the canvas overlaying their portraits. Then there is an installation of bodies buried in gravel with its lower limbs sticking upward from the ground and arrows piercing through. On the walls surrounding the installation are paintings of piles of needles and bloodied dragonflies.

Wire Tuazon, “Revisiting: Sometimes We Name Typhoons After Men”, Giant Dwarf Art Space.

“Ambulance V: The New Messiah (After Chris Burden)”, Oil and silver leaf on canvas; 48 x 60 inches, 2014; “The Nile Delta: The Birth of the First Great Diptych”, Oil on canvas, 48 x 96 inches (each diptych)

A diptych of a calm sea is divided by a blue LED strip light. One could remember the story of when Moses was commanded by God to spread his arms. The Red Sea parted allowing the Israelites to depart out of Egypt towards the Promised Land. On both sides of the diptych are knives stuck on the wall as if suspended in time. Across is a painting of the classic Volkswagen Beetle. A half naked man lies on the vehicle’s rear with his legs together and his arms splayed on its roof. The word “AMBULANCE” is written but flipped horizontally

 Jed Gregorio, “Mythology”, KalawakanSpacetime.

The space is turned into Hell’s waiting room where life flashes back. A compilation of the artist’s TikTok videos are projected on one wall. From everyday mundanities to the trends in the online platform, these are performed again in the slideshows in which one voyeurs over the artist’s phone gallery. Poems are written on the walls where paper cutout butterflies fly over these words like souls revisiting what was once said. Then there is a mattress with toilet rolls acting as vases for the carnations and with gallons of water as if the tears shed in the bed were collected.

Iris Babao-Uy, Nell Belgado, Glenn Perez, and Tessa Punzalan-Brodet, “Intrinsic Brilliance”, ArtistSpace.

The exhibition could be viewed as a portrait of pastel medium as a living subject showing the viewer its inherent characteristics, its possibilities, and its limitations without diminishing its power. It could also be the artists’ homage to the pastel medium because rather than focusing on the skills the artists rendered in their works, their intention in mounting the show is to allow the viewer to understand the medium intimately by deconstructing its complexities, hoping to correct the misunderstandings surrounding it. The show could be a strong argument of how pastel is a painting at par with oils and acrylics.

Yao Sampana, “Above the Desolation”, White Walls Gallery.

Naked bodies. Wilted flowers. Worn off couch. Dried leaves. Mossy stool. Leafless branch. Life continues to spring in scenes of desolation: flower springs from a broken wall of bricks, wild grass emerge from a sea of waste, and wild flowers take root within a crack in the concrete. Amidst the apocalyptically empty world in these paintings, bodies fall from the sky as if born again with exhausted heart but with renewed hope, reminiscing memories of the past and envisioning possibilities of the future. What these muted-toned figures have is now as they are suspended in the present moment of time.