Gerry Tan: info
Gerry Tan, born 1960, lives and works in Manila, Philippines
Gerry Tan explores the "work of art in the age mechanical reproduction" questioning sites of meaning and experience through an endless array of multiples reverse-engineered into originals. Appropriation, as something that is borrowed or quoted from its original source that reveals the relationship between the original and the copy, along with notions of ownership and authenticity, is a condition that appears and reappears in Gerry Tan’s work. His paintings are for the most part composed of multiple layers of imagery taken from the world of art, which in itself is a culture of representation, and from mass media, which involves the reproduction and dissemination of images. Tan's subsequent retouching and remixing of visual information in his work gives way to new itinerant meanings that become critical tangents for the further deconstruction of control codes.
Gerardo Tan took his BFA degree in Painting at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and his MFA degree in Painting at the State University of New York at Buffalo on a Fullbright Fellowship grant. A multimedia artist, he works with objects and photo-based installations, artist books, collages and mixed media paintings. His recent collage-based paintings fuse digital prints and paint, probing postmodern concepts of originality and individual style. He has participated in many local and international exhibitions among which are the 1st Melbourne Biennale (1999) and the 2nd Asian Art Show in Fukuoka Museum (1982). He is also a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1988.
Gerry Tan explores the "work of art in the age mechanical reproduction" questioning sites of meaning and experience through an endless array of multiples reverse-engineered into originals. Appropriation, as something that is borrowed or quoted from its original source that reveals the relationship between the original and the copy, along with notions of ownership and authenticity, is a condition that appears and reappears in Gerry Tan’s work. His paintings are for the most part composed of multiple layers of imagery taken from the world of art, which in itself is a culture of representation, and from mass media, which involves the reproduction and dissemination of images. Tan's subsequent retouching and remixing of visual information in his work gives way to new itinerant meanings that become critical tangents for the further deconstruction of control codes.
Gerardo Tan took his BFA degree in Painting at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and his MFA degree in Painting at the State University of New York at Buffalo on a Fullbright Fellowship grant. A multimedia artist, he works with objects and photo-based installations, artist books, collages and mixed media paintings. His recent collage-based paintings fuse digital prints and paint, probing postmodern concepts of originality and individual style. He has participated in many local and international exhibitions among which are the 1st Melbourne Biennale (1999) and the 2nd Asian Art Show in Fukuoka Museum (1982). He is also a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 1988.
Carlo Ricafort: info
Carlo Ricafort, Born 1975 in Manila, Philippines; lives and works in San Francisco, CA
Ricafort's work involves free-associative commentaries on society and history through innovative designs that blur representation with abstraction. His aesthetic is a painterly visualization of the abstraction or contradiction of social conditions, which operatively becomes a de-coding of cryptic social messages through which it provides for itself the power of politics. Thus, his artistic process can gain the appearance of being chaotic, eclectic, open-ended, and even “pirated” from multiple sources. But it is in this chasm of polar opposites – from the depths of his psyche to the superficiality of current events, where he looks for meaning.
Born in Quezon City, Philippines, San Francisco based artist Carlo Ricafort received his B.F.A. in Pictorial Arts from San José State University and has exhibited at numerous galleries and cultural spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Manila. In the past 3 years, Ricafort has been actively exhibiting and collaborating with artists from Manila including collaborations with Artist Formerly Known As Friend (AFKAF) based in the Bay Area and Kwatro-Kantos, A solo exhibition at Pablo Fort and a group show with Manuel Ocampo at Finale Art File. He currently resides and works in San Francisco, CA.
Ricafort's work involves free-associative commentaries on society and history through innovative designs that blur representation with abstraction. His aesthetic is a painterly visualization of the abstraction or contradiction of social conditions, which operatively becomes a de-coding of cryptic social messages through which it provides for itself the power of politics. Thus, his artistic process can gain the appearance of being chaotic, eclectic, open-ended, and even “pirated” from multiple sources. But it is in this chasm of polar opposites – from the depths of his psyche to the superficiality of current events, where he looks for meaning.
Born in Quezon City, Philippines, San Francisco based artist Carlo Ricafort received his B.F.A. in Pictorial Arts from San José State University and has exhibited at numerous galleries and cultural spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Manila. In the past 3 years, Ricafort has been actively exhibiting and collaborating with artists from Manila including collaborations with Artist Formerly Known As Friend (AFKAF) based in the Bay Area and Kwatro-Kantos, A solo exhibition at Pablo Fort and a group show with Manuel Ocampo at Finale Art File. He currently resides and works in San Francisco, CA.
Juan Carlos Quintana: info
Juan Carlos Quintana, lives and works in Oakland, California
Juan Carlos Quintana uses random cartoon and found imagery out of context to create quirky, ambiguous, non-linear narratives that speak to the fear of impending doom, self-doubt, and sublime melancholy. Ultimately, these paintings ruminate on a culture ready to self-implode teetering on its own false pretenses. His work challenges conventional representations of identity, ethnicity, politics, and history through imaginative psychodramas that illuminate the individual's plight against dehumanizing standardization.
Juan Carlos Quintana was born in Louisiana in 1964. He is a self-taught artist currently living and working in Oakland, California. He has shown in many San Francisco Bay Area venues such as John Berggruen Gallery, Jack Fischer Gallery, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts just to name a few. He has also shown internationally at the Freies Museum in Berlin and Centro de Desarollo de las Artes Visuales, in Havana, Cuba . He has been awarded artist residencies at the Djerassi Resident Program in Woodside, California, and most recently at the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhausin in Schwandorf, Germany in the summer of 2010. He is part the collaborative teams MIJU, with Michele Muennig, and Artist Formerly Known As Friend (AFKAF) based in San Francisco and Manila.
Juan Carlos Quintana uses random cartoon and found imagery out of context to create quirky, ambiguous, non-linear narratives that speak to the fear of impending doom, self-doubt, and sublime melancholy. Ultimately, these paintings ruminate on a culture ready to self-implode teetering on its own false pretenses. His work challenges conventional representations of identity, ethnicity, politics, and history through imaginative psychodramas that illuminate the individual's plight against dehumanizing standardization.
Juan Carlos Quintana was born in Louisiana in 1964. He is a self-taught artist currently living and working in Oakland, California. He has shown in many San Francisco Bay Area venues such as John Berggruen Gallery, Jack Fischer Gallery, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts just to name a few. He has also shown internationally at the Freies Museum in Berlin and Centro de Desarollo de las Artes Visuales, in Havana, Cuba . He has been awarded artist residencies at the Djerassi Resident Program in Woodside, California, and most recently at the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhausin in Schwandorf, Germany in the summer of 2010. He is part the collaborative teams MIJU, with Michele Muennig, and Artist Formerly Known As Friend (AFKAF) based in San Francisco and Manila.
Jayson Oliveria: info
Jayson Oliveria, born 1973, lives and works in Manila
Oliveria applies end game strategies for making paintings and incorporates objects or sculptural elements to betray the uniformity of painting. Like most works that straddle along the discourse of the end of art, the works have an internal logic to them that only the artist could explain – if it can be teased. Rather, there is a sense of gamesmanship and perhaps, dandyism where the artist knows all the contradictions within the work while displaying a keen taste for the obsolescence of style.
Oliveria was a CCP Thirteen Artist awardee in 2006 and was among the 1st batch of resident artists of Big Sky Mind Artists Projects Foundation in Cubao from 2003 to 2004. The following year he was sent to Fukuoka, Japan for an artist residency facilitated by curator Mizuki Endo in Tetra Art Space. In 2004, he was among the first recipient of the annual Ateneo Art awards for his exhibit Instinct vs. Learning held at Mag:net QC, and in the following year was nominated for the same award for his solo show Killa Foto at Green Papaya Artists Projects. Consistently being exhibited extensively both locally and abroad, he has been featured in a handful of important survey shows such as in Nadi Gallery in Jakarta, in Tate Turbine Hall in London thru Green Papaya, in Sydney and Tasmania, in HK, in the USA and in Beijing, China.
Oliveria applies end game strategies for making paintings and incorporates objects or sculptural elements to betray the uniformity of painting. Like most works that straddle along the discourse of the end of art, the works have an internal logic to them that only the artist could explain – if it can be teased. Rather, there is a sense of gamesmanship and perhaps, dandyism where the artist knows all the contradictions within the work while displaying a keen taste for the obsolescence of style.
Oliveria was a CCP Thirteen Artist awardee in 2006 and was among the 1st batch of resident artists of Big Sky Mind Artists Projects Foundation in Cubao from 2003 to 2004. The following year he was sent to Fukuoka, Japan for an artist residency facilitated by curator Mizuki Endo in Tetra Art Space. In 2004, he was among the first recipient of the annual Ateneo Art awards for his exhibit Instinct vs. Learning held at Mag:net QC, and in the following year was nominated for the same award for his solo show Killa Foto at Green Papaya Artists Projects. Consistently being exhibited extensively both locally and abroad, he has been featured in a handful of important survey shows such as in Nadi Gallery in Jakarta, in Tate Turbine Hall in London thru Green Papaya, in Sydney and Tasmania, in HK, in the USA and in Beijing, China.
Pow Martinez: info
Pow Martinez, born 1983, lives and works in Manila
Using expressive viscous paint across the surface of his canvases that continue to evoke the pain and pleasure of our mortal existence, Martinez employs an agitated shorthand transcription of the grotesque featuring mutants, monsters, demons, demon worshipers, deviants and freaks, who by and large function as cathartic symbolic alternatives to the humanity stripping conventions of everyday life: in them we begin to ask if they are more real than the real.
Martinez has held 4 solo exhibits in Manila. His show "1 Billion Years" at West Gallery Manila earned him the 2010 Ateneo Art Awards. In addition to his work as a painter, Martinez is an accomplished sound artist, exploring sound like paint in the explosion and reconstitution of its material to evoke new experiences. His sound art projects are recorded and released under the name Nun Radar and has been included in a number of SABAW cd compilations.
Using expressive viscous paint across the surface of his canvases that continue to evoke the pain and pleasure of our mortal existence, Martinez employs an agitated shorthand transcription of the grotesque featuring mutants, monsters, demons, demon worshipers, deviants and freaks, who by and large function as cathartic symbolic alternatives to the humanity stripping conventions of everyday life: in them we begin to ask if they are more real than the real.
Martinez has held 4 solo exhibits in Manila. His show "1 Billion Years" at West Gallery Manila earned him the 2010 Ateneo Art Awards. In addition to his work as a painter, Martinez is an accomplished sound artist, exploring sound like paint in the explosion and reconstitution of its material to evoke new experiences. His sound art projects are recorded and released under the name Nun Radar and has been included in a number of SABAW cd compilations.
Romeo Lee: info
Romeo Lee, born 1956, lives and works in Manila
Romeo Lee gives us a hallucinatory vision of spiritual life, not so much in the glorious portrayal of religious salvation but in the revelation of immanent evil that is induced by the conditions of life. Call it an exorcism of an aesthetic kind if you will, Lee having released grossly formed phantoms that possess his characters to do inhuman things and deform their bodies into diabolical contortions.
Lee is an icon of subcultural activity in Manila, his highly regarded presence circle around the spheres of art, music, and entertainment since the 80's. He has shown in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, United States, and regularly exhibits at Finale Art File in Manila.
Romeo Lee gives us a hallucinatory vision of spiritual life, not so much in the glorious portrayal of religious salvation but in the revelation of immanent evil that is induced by the conditions of life. Call it an exorcism of an aesthetic kind if you will, Lee having released grossly formed phantoms that possess his characters to do inhuman things and deform their bodies into diabolical contortions.
Lee is an icon of subcultural activity in Manila, his highly regarded presence circle around the spheres of art, music, and entertainment since the 80's. He has shown in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, United States, and regularly exhibits at Finale Art File in Manila.
Robert Langenegger: info
Robert Langenegger, born 1983 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, lives and works Manila, Philippines
If painting could return to its realist function, holding a mirror of society, Langenegger would succeed as a new fangled form of artistic chronicler, not in the realist stylings of Zola or Balzac, but following more in the steps of Baudelaire's splenetic barbs on modern life. Thus said, upon seeing Langenegger's brutal and vulgar renditions of social life, in the raw so to speak, with so many pictorial situations involving lewd sexuality coupled with psychological violence, we take his aesthetic thoughtfully as symbolic manifestations of the unconscious rendered without inhibition.
Langenegger studied Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. He was shortlisted in 2008 in the Ateneo Art Awards for his show Irish Bull of the Mother and Child held at Finale art file in 2007 and was a finalist in the 2008 Sovereign Asian Art prize. In 2009, he had a solo exhibit at Talmart Galerie in Paris, France. His work has also been featured in exhibits held in Australia, Hongkong and the US. He also has taught himself the art of tattooing and the science of horticulture.
If painting could return to its realist function, holding a mirror of society, Langenegger would succeed as a new fangled form of artistic chronicler, not in the realist stylings of Zola or Balzac, but following more in the steps of Baudelaire's splenetic barbs on modern life. Thus said, upon seeing Langenegger's brutal and vulgar renditions of social life, in the raw so to speak, with so many pictorial situations involving lewd sexuality coupled with psychological violence, we take his aesthetic thoughtfully as symbolic manifestations of the unconscious rendered without inhibition.
Langenegger studied Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. He was shortlisted in 2008 in the Ateneo Art Awards for his show Irish Bull of the Mother and Child held at Finale art file in 2007 and was a finalist in the 2008 Sovereign Asian Art prize. In 2009, he had a solo exhibit at Talmart Galerie in Paris, France. His work has also been featured in exhibits held in Australia, Hongkong and the US. He also has taught himself the art of tattooing and the science of horticulture.
David Griggs: info
David Griggs, lives and works in Manila, Philippines
David Griggs is an Australian artist currently living and working in Manila, who uses urban leitmotifs in his paintings and installations that question the control protocols pervading within private and public domains. His works vary across different mediums. Predominantly a painter and photographer, Griggs has also created large-scale site-specific installations that comment on politics, poverty, prostitution, gang tattooing and freak shows.
Griggs has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and Asia and has conducted research for projects during residencies in Barcelona, Manila, Thailand and Burma. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions including Frat of the Obese, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2011) Fluid Zones Biennale Jakarta XIII (2009), Blood on the Streets, Artspace, Sydney (2007), The Independence Project, Galerie Petronas, Kuala Lumpur (2007), Exchanging Culture for Flesh, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2006), Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2006), The Buko Police, Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila (2005), and New York, London, Paris, Rome, Manila City Jail, Green Papaya Art Projects Manila, (2009) The sort of black claymore paintings, Pablo Galley, Manila (2010) Post Criminal, Kaliman Gallery, Sydney (2010). Griggs is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, KalimanRawlins Gallery, Melbourne, Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz and LOSTprojects, Manila.
David Griggs is an Australian artist currently living and working in Manila, who uses urban leitmotifs in his paintings and installations that question the control protocols pervading within private and public domains. His works vary across different mediums. Predominantly a painter and photographer, Griggs has also created large-scale site-specific installations that comment on politics, poverty, prostitution, gang tattooing and freak shows.
Griggs has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and Asia and has conducted research for projects during residencies in Barcelona, Manila, Thailand and Burma. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions including Frat of the Obese, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2011) Fluid Zones Biennale Jakarta XIII (2009), Blood on the Streets, Artspace, Sydney (2007), The Independence Project, Galerie Petronas, Kuala Lumpur (2007), Exchanging Culture for Flesh, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2006), Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2006), The Buko Police, Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila (2005), and New York, London, Paris, Rome, Manila City Jail, Green Papaya Art Projects Manila, (2009) The sort of black claymore paintings, Pablo Galley, Manila (2010) Post Criminal, Kaliman Gallery, Sydney (2010). Griggs is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, KalimanRawlins Gallery, Melbourne, Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz and LOSTprojects, Manila.
Dex Fernandez: info
Dex Fernandez, lives and works in Manila, Philippines
Operating on various layers of meaning, the practice of ornamentation in the hands of Dex Fernandez turns into a play of signs that collide to construct new associative concepts, where the third meaning subsequently produced illuminating previously unseen messages. Fernandez works with found images and material that he collages together to create fantastical figurative compositions, adding further to the mix is another skin inscribed with personal design, esoteric languages, chimera, and imaginary landscapes, all of which serve to create a labyrinth of possibilities.
Operating on various layers of meaning, the practice of ornamentation in the hands of Dex Fernandez turns into a play of signs that collide to construct new associative concepts, where the third meaning subsequently produced illuminating previously unseen messages. Fernandez works with found images and material that he collages together to create fantastical figurative compositions, adding further to the mix is another skin inscribed with personal design, esoteric languages, chimera, and imaginary landscapes, all of which serve to create a labyrinth of possibilities.
Louie Cordero: info
Louie Cordero, lives and works in Manila, Philippines
Visual overload as a metaphor for the postmodern condition of information bombardment and loss of ontological shape is characteristic of Louie Cordero's work, with which the densely layered pictorial space further points to the palimpsest of foreign colonial cultures present within the Filipino psyche in conflict over its constitution. Thus, a body politic consumed with violence and absurdity betrays the artifice of beauty and nobility commonly attributed to the Filipino subject, which becomes Cordero's aesthetic and ethical compass between the east and the west, history and contemporary society, high and low cultures, along with the war pitting good against evil.
Cordero is a graduate of the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines, and was a resident artist in the Big Sky Mind art foundation residency program from 2002 to 2004. In 2003, he had a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States. Cordero is a recipient of numerous awards including the Ateneo Art Award in 2004, and the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2006.
Visual overload as a metaphor for the postmodern condition of information bombardment and loss of ontological shape is characteristic of Louie Cordero's work, with which the densely layered pictorial space further points to the palimpsest of foreign colonial cultures present within the Filipino psyche in conflict over its constitution. Thus, a body politic consumed with violence and absurdity betrays the artifice of beauty and nobility commonly attributed to the Filipino subject, which becomes Cordero's aesthetic and ethical compass between the east and the west, history and contemporary society, high and low cultures, along with the war pitting good against evil.
Cordero is a graduate of the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines, and was a resident artist in the Big Sky Mind art foundation residency program from 2002 to 2004. In 2003, he had a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States. Cordero is a recipient of numerous awards including the Ateneo Art Award in 2004, and the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2006.
Manuel Ocampo: info
Manuel Ocampo, lives and works in Manila, Philippines
The artist's statement: “The theme that comes up again and again are figures that connect to a sort of myth-induced stereotype rendered iconic, but are bludgeoned into a farcical, conceptual iconoclasm rendered absurd by its exaggerated impotence as carriers of meaning or the esthetics of politics. The paintings are a comment on desire as painting itself is an object accustomed to this wish of being desirous, yet, in the series, they have a knack of providing some difficulty to the viewer as the conventions of painting are dismantled to the point of ridicule.”
Using an eclectic mix of art historical styles appropriated to further complicate the uncertainty of meaning as to deconstruct the hierarchical power relations between signs: juxtaposing religious iconography with the secular and the subconscious, producing tragic allegories played by comic actors, impregnating language with bastard content, and presenting tautological compositions to critique notions of authenticity and ownership; Ocampo consistently makes work that unmask the illusion of the real by subverting social belief systems through visual pranks barbed with sobering thought.
Ocampo has exhibited extensively throughout the 1990s, with solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions through Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In 2005, his work was the subject of a large-scale survey at Casa Asia in Barcelona, and Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Sigean, France. Ocampo's work has been included in a number of international surveys, including the 2004 Seville Biennale, 2001 Venice Biennale, the 2001 Berlin Biennale, the 2000 Biennale d’art Contemporain de Lyon, the 1997 Kwangju Biennial, the 1993 Corcoran Biennial, and 1992's controversial Documenta IX. His work was featured in many group shows in the 1990s, including Helter Skelter: LA Art of the 1990s, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1992; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art at the Asia Society, New York in 1994; American Stories: Amidst Displacement and Transformation at Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo in 1997; Pop Surrealism at the Aldrich Museum of Artin 1998; and Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2000. He has received a number of prestigious grants and awards, including the Giverny Residency (1998), the Rome Prize at the American Academy (1995–96), National Endowment for the Arts (1996), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1995) and Art Matters Inc. (1991).
The artist's statement: “The theme that comes up again and again are figures that connect to a sort of myth-induced stereotype rendered iconic, but are bludgeoned into a farcical, conceptual iconoclasm rendered absurd by its exaggerated impotence as carriers of meaning or the esthetics of politics. The paintings are a comment on desire as painting itself is an object accustomed to this wish of being desirous, yet, in the series, they have a knack of providing some difficulty to the viewer as the conventions of painting are dismantled to the point of ridicule.”
Using an eclectic mix of art historical styles appropriated to further complicate the uncertainty of meaning as to deconstruct the hierarchical power relations between signs: juxtaposing religious iconography with the secular and the subconscious, producing tragic allegories played by comic actors, impregnating language with bastard content, and presenting tautological compositions to critique notions of authenticity and ownership; Ocampo consistently makes work that unmask the illusion of the real by subverting social belief systems through visual pranks barbed with sobering thought.
Ocampo has exhibited extensively throughout the 1990s, with solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions through Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In 2005, his work was the subject of a large-scale survey at Casa Asia in Barcelona, and Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Sigean, France. Ocampo's work has been included in a number of international surveys, including the 2004 Seville Biennale, 2001 Venice Biennale, the 2001 Berlin Biennale, the 2000 Biennale d’art Contemporain de Lyon, the 1997 Kwangju Biennial, the 1993 Corcoran Biennial, and 1992's controversial Documenta IX. His work was featured in many group shows in the 1990s, including Helter Skelter: LA Art of the 1990s, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1992; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art at the Asia Society, New York in 1994; American Stories: Amidst Displacement and Transformation at Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo in 1997; Pop Surrealism at the Aldrich Museum of Artin 1998; and Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2000. He has received a number of prestigious grants and awards, including the Giverny Residency (1998), the Rome Prize at the American Academy (1995–96), National Endowment for the Arts (1996), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1995) and Art Matters Inc. (1991).
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