Behind The Clouds

  • drawingroomgallery_admin
  • April 4, 2019

 

 

 

 

 

Behind The Clouds

Ronald Ventura

Catalogue

19 x 23.5 cm

2016

Catalogue for artist Ronald Ventura’s exhibit Behind The Clouds at The Drawing Room

The title suggests the existence of something veiled or hidden in the vast sky, its resonance resting upon its power to provoke a curious mind’s tendency to imagine what lies beneath a visible surface, or what lurks beyond the known world. With it comes the promise of discovery: a possible revelation once obstruction clears and covers open up. Such play on the phrase “behind the clouds”offers a wealth of significations that works on multiple levels of associations, weaving the various pieces gathered for this exhibition together, and ultimately highlighting the creative potential of exploring the links between language, imagery and symbolism.

Excerpt from Behind the Clouds, Ruel Caasi

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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Viriñas

 

 

 

 

 

Viriñas

Roberto Feleo

Catalogue

23.5 x 19.5 cm

2009

Catalogue of artist Roberto Feleo’s exhibit Viriñas at The Drawing Room

Roberto Feleo’s series of vitrines takes us to hothouses of faith. They are practically experiments of science and religion, natural history and spirituality, domesticity and the public sphere. The bell jar is a controlled environment where flora is placed and observed. As decoration, it encases objects set apart as either delicate or rare, or recovered from foreign, exotic places, reminiscent of the cabinet of curiosities.

Excerpt from Firmament, Patrick D. Flores

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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The Drawing Room Catalogue 2002

  • drawingroomgallery_admin
  • April 4, 2019

 

 

 

 

 

The Drawing Room

Catalogue

23 x 22.5 cm

2002

The Drawing Room’s governing aesthetic illustrates an idiosyncratic taming of creative energies, one that is alternately welcome and troubling for the devout anarchist but instructive as an exercise in still largely congenial negotiation between structured and unautocratic creative tension. This modest sampling of work from seventeen Filipino artists reveals a level of visuality extracted from a spectrum of art persuasions tempered in The Drawing Room’s various spaces.

Excerpt from Drawing Space, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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and of time

 

 

 

 

 

and of time

Roderico Jose Daroy

Catalogue

19.5 x 23.5 cm

2010

Catalogue for artist Roderico Jose Daroy’s exhibit and of time at The Drawing Room

 

Daroy titles this exhibition and of time, citing the photographer Uta Barth’s series of photographs that dwell on the incidental and linger on the quiet. It is arrested in its course, just like Daroy’s forays that are delayed, syncopated, foil to the frenzy, the edgy, the up=to=date: a time-consuming obliviousness. It is an enigmatic phrase, with a connective and a noun in one breath, nexus and name that when spoken conjure the uknowing.

Excerpt from Gamut, Patrick D. Flores

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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Pitch Black

 

 

 

 

 

Pitch Black

Jojo Lofranco

Catalogue

19.5 x 23.5 cm

2002

Catalogue of the artist Jojo Lofranco’s exhibit Pitch Black at The Drawing Room

Central to knowing what Lofranco’s Pitch Black is all about is a series within his b&w series titled “Versions of the Unreleased” (Nos. 1-4) which suggests the tension between repression and release, potency and act. One can’t imagine any other colors in the painter’s palette than black and white in projecting the drama of liberation struggle – any liberation struggle one can name, from political to religious to sexual – in the visual shorthand of abstraction.

 

Excerpt from When Black Is More, Emmanuel Torres

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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Images of the Past Catalogue

 

 

 

 

 

Images of the Past

John Frank Sabado

Catalogue

21.5 x 14.5 cm

2016

Catalogue for artist John Frank Sabado’s exhibit Images of the Past, at The Drawing Room

John Frank Sabado’s lifework emanates from his context of belonging to the Mountain Province, guided as an autodidact to the people’s everyday practice of articulating and performing traditions. The narratives of his landscape vacillate within the ongoing system of adapting in time – whether in antagonism to the “modern world’s” intervention to its ecology or a reinforcement of symbology that persists regardless of the phenomenon of change.

 

Excerpt from Many and One in John Frank Sabado’s Landscapes, Sidd Perez

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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Circa Circus

 

 

 

 

 

Circa Circus

Catalogue

19.5 x 23.5 cm

2011

Circa Circus brings together, for the first time, a series of Escora’s large-scale charcoal works. At the same time, we witness the artist’s definite trajectory towards exploring the mental event of accumulating content vis-a-vis the operations of intuition in relating to the influx of images and references that preoccupy our daily experiences. He construes the more immediate, personal state of acquiring, sieving out and distributing images. Unlike the visual ease of many of his portraits, the ones from this series are manipulated in tones, interweaving the play of contrasts and shadow. The process involved in Escora’s new charcoal works is about the deliberate mastery of the dominating medium of charcoal where the image needs to materialize before the execution. With such little space for change, these works encapsulates decisions driven by an exactness that can only be predetermined with gut feel.

 

Excerpt from Good Omens, Sidd Perez

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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Life Is Short Pek-Pek Shorts

 

 

 

 

 

Life Is Short Pek-Pek Shorts
Mark Tandoyog

Catalogue

14 x 18.5 cm

2018

“Philippine art beyond the capital in Manila and the country has flourished. And it is best to look at the art world as inhabiting multiple terrains. Specific locations outside Manila have produced a distinct array of images, processes, and even ethical modes of making art and responding to communities. In overseas communities, Filipino artists invoke the Philippines not exclusively within the limiting discourse of identity and nationalism, but try to converse with the concerns of a global, more cosmopolitan  context of art making.”

Patrick D. Flores

 

Mark Tandoyog’s works retrofit the anarcho-punk into everyday slogans on local politics. He also marks canvasses with pop satire that read as absurd more than the shock of conventional punk visuals.

. . .The rare union of “indigenous”and “punk”  informs his “making,” pairing pop and folk imagery, humor, and agitated sloganeering.

To Mark, his focus on dualities is more an engagement with his community as it assimilates to global capital. It is more than a strict philosophical construct in art-making.

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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Verso Manila

 

 

 

 

 

Verso Manila
Contemporary Filipino Artists in Turin

Catalogue

22 x 28 cm

2010

“Philippine art beyond the capital in Manila and the country has flourished. And it is best to look at the art world as inhabiting multiple terrains. Specific locations outside Manila have produced a distinct array of images, processes, and even ethical modes of making art and responding to communities. In overseas communities, Filipino artists invoke the Philippines not exclusively within the limiting discourse of identity and nationalism, but try to converse with the concerns of a global, more cosmopolitan  context of art making.”

Patrick D. Flores

 

Verso Manila, Contemporary Filipino Artists in Turin, is the opening exhibition of Verso Artecontemporanea in the renovated space of via Pesaro 22 in Turin from November 4th 2009 to January 21st 2010. The collective exhibition showcases the works of 16 Filipino artists (Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Marina Cruz, Kawayan de Guia, Kiko Escora, Kidlat de Guia, Alvin Gregorio, Dei Jardiniano, Winner Jumalon, Jose Legaspi, Maya Muñoz, Wawi Navarroza, Leeroy New, Diokno Pasilan, Lirio Salvador, Mark Salvatus, Rodel Tapaya), who present themselves for the first time to the Italian art scene. The catalogue, with texts in Italian and English, features reproductions of all the paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations and includes critical essays by Patrick D. Flores and Lorenzo Balbi.

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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Stories of Dreams and Realities

 

 

 

 

 

Stories of Dreams and Realities
Rossi Rossi 
London, United Kingdom
In collaboration with The Drawing Room, Manila

Catalogue

22 x 28 cm

2011

Art in the Philippines has had a history of inclining outwards, always gesturing towards an ‘elsewhere’ that reveals reality in other climates far from the tropics while imbibing the sentiment of the expectant native. Conversely, this ‘elsewhere’, this ‘promise of the foreign’, has been aspired to as an index of a kinder survival, a reprieve from the harsh temper of the islands, the main impulse of migration and of allegory. In light of this art’s emergence as a tool of instruction, and therefore a vehicle of conversion of three successive colonial occupations by Spain, America and Japan, beginning in the sixteenth century and ending in the second half of the twentieth century, the notion and moment of ‘art’, in the sense of its institution as a particular social practice, could only have been part of a grander project of conquest. Such conquest created eccentricities of form quite alien to the supposed sources of a supposedly superior influence. This is how a fairer view of ‘art’ within this latitude (not a province of the metropolis, to be sure) might proceed; one that is tainted by civilization – culture being fundamentally a corruption – and at the same time instilled with the struggle to overcome the condition of control.
The modernity of this tradition of art is robust. Filipino printmakers signed their names on maps in the eighteenth century, and the first school of drawing in Asia opened in Manila in the nineteenth century – in the same season that the first history painting was created in the region (a series of fourteen panels depicting a revolt incited by protest against the monopoly of sugarcane wine). In the late nineteenth the colonial subject Juan Luna, who studied art in Madrid, at that time the capital of the Philippines’ conqueror, was awarded a gold medal in the 1884 Madrid Exposition of Fine Art. From this trajectory of seminal achievements came a complex expression of modernism, from the 1920s through the 1950s. Stirrings of the contemporary began to surface in the 1970s, alongside massive infrastructure for culture from an authoritarian state and the reciprocal resistance from a social realist movement sympathetic to socialism. It was in this furnace that what may be described as contemporary art in the Philippines came to be wrought.

 

Excerpt from Persuasion Flights, Patrick D. Flores

 

For Inquiries, contact us at +63 2 801-4397 to 98 or  email contact@drawingroomgallery.com

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