“To a great extent, Pasilan performs this instinct: conversing with the crowd, observing how craft and imported ware mingle, and learning from the tale in which object and subject and tale are central. It is this kind of relationality that inflects his history of skill, quite remote from the overinvestment in so-called intellect, language games, and conceptual ruses. This is not to say, however, that his disposition is bereft of reflection or critique altogether. It is precisely its sensitivity to the condition of the locus and the agency of its supposed natives that instills a mentality, a way of thinking and feeling that does not merely intellectualize or interpret; rather it intuits, it listens, it mediates in the sharing of everyday narratives, their tangible fictions and mythologies. The artist becomes a co-sufferer of memory and present circumstance because he opens himself up to it, lets it touch him and hopefully change him. And in his art, the “other” materializes in the form of a fellow stranger finding the chance to gain presence through a personal universe of abode and image, basically of appearance, a certain beauty and its vision that hover into view, no matter how precariously or faintly like a dream of distance on diaphanous fiber.”

 

Excerpt from Palawan-Perth, Patrick D. Flores.