Nona Garcia’s ‘Overland’ attempts to unsettle the boundary between fictitious and real.

Written by Chesca Santiago
August 3, 2023

One at the foyer, five inside the main exhibition space—you can almost count on one hand the artworks that constitute Overland, Nona Garcia’s latest exhibition at Silverlens Manila. Yet as in the familiar ways of Garcia, leanness in number is offset by magnitude in scale; in Overland, large canvases predominantly fill the exhibit venue. And this marks only the beginning of the exhibition’s manifold engagements with reality and scale.

Take, for example, the eponymous 7 x 12 feet oil on canvas Overland (2023) which greets visitors as they slide the entry doors into the foyer. The painting is a photorealist rendering of a corroding truck against an equally desolate terrain. The canvas is propped up by large rock-like figures similar to what we see in Garcia’s canvas, as if transposing elements of the painting into the physical gallery space.

Moments like this, where the painted image reaches into our physical space, persist throughout the show. I find this once more in Untitled Pine Tree (2018), where tree branches, trunks, and twigs are segmented into 50 oil on wood veneer panels that dot an entire wall of the gallery. Fragments of a tree painted on nothing less than wood—the exhibition’s attempts to unsettle the boundary between fictitious and real become more explicit here.

Garcia extends this ploy to the paired Building Mountains (2023) and Fool’s Gold (2023). The latter, an oil on cement pedestal rendering of a rock, isolates an individual component of the former: a 10 x 15 feet vista of rocks, gravel, and all it takes to build a mountain. With Fool’s Gold’s pedestal spotlit from overhead, the configuration of the two works makes it seem as if Garcia is drawing our attention to the minute components of the grand. It makes more apparent the exhibition’s concern with scale as it threads the line between smallness and greatness.

The rest of the exhibition space opens up with two large-scale oil on canvas works: Ascend III, Green Fortress (2022), a cross-section of a rock wall overgrown with moss; and Oil (2022), where a metal oil tank is shown, similar to Overland (2023), corroding as it is encroached by leaves and neglect. The two works are placed adjacent to and facing Building Mountains (2023), introducing a notion of abandonment different from this. Whereas the latter foregrounds it through barrenness, Ascend III, Green Fortress (2022) and Oil (2022) point to it as overgrown—desolation amid lushness.

At this point in the show, we have seen Garcia, with nothing less than her mastery of photorealism, engage with reality and scale in various degrees. Perhaps part of it is owed to the exhibition’s effective configuration of its physical space—how the gallery walls just seem the perfect size for Garcia’s large-scale canvases without dwarfing nor dominating them; how the gallery space is an extension of the painted vista in several ways. It is through these that the exhibition is able to build landscapes that are at once familiar and unknown. The exhibition notes explain that in Overland, Garcia drew her images from Baguio, a city she relocated to in 2013. Yet rightfully, it proceeds to point out that Garcia’s Baguio in Overland is hardly the summer capital that we know. 

Instead, she maps out the land through its essence—through its rocks, gravel, grass, and twigs, an attention to the minute that constitutes the vastness so that magnitude never feels overwhelming in Garcia’s large-scale works. It is why, despite having been derived from a specific place of her own recollection, Garcia’s landscapes remain familiar to us in our own personal terms. The goal is not to reproduce a recognizable place, but to retain its essence and find it anywhere—a universality that unfolds through the essence of the land, inviting you to embrace your own smallness.

Because, after all, it is smallness that makes up the grand.