Art Informal's artists-in-residence Riel Hilario and Carlo Angelo Saavedra are featured in The Exiles, a two-man exhibition of their recent series of works, from September 4 to 18.

The Exiles, a metaphor of the relative isolation in pursuit of a body of work, also draws together both artists' experiences of meandering from familiar comfort zones of family and relationships, of logic and history, in order to seek answers and also, to pose questions.

Hilario strays from linear history to indulge in questions of "what ifs" and "why nots" in pictorial counter-narratives in oil on canvas. Believing that all historical knowledge is continuously transformed by local and personal experience, he investigates the effect of altering the familiar and iconic from the perspective of the vernacular. 'What if Filipinos landed on the moon?' provokes the re-working of the moon buggy (believed to be designed by a Pinoy engineer) into a "vernacularized" picture of all the baggage and trappings a Pinoy astronaut would bring to another world. 'Why not monuments to exalt the ordinary deeds of heroes?' is a question that leads to a canvas depicting the national hero Jose Rizal answering a human-all-too-human call of nature and showing his clowning antics in a photo shoot.

The artist taps into a variety of imagery and narrative sources - dreams, print media, cyber media and urban legend and gossip to fire up curiosity and leading to framing different "public" knowledge into personal quests for alternatives.

Saavedra begins and ends his canvases with an inquiry into the processes of painting and image making. Largely self-taught the young artist works with automatic painting and allows subconscious-driven gestures and brushwork to create compositions, later intervening in the final stages by forming a story with a more narrative frame of mind. This two-step process allows the artist to step out of the boundaries of the image, and the familiar, indulging first in action painting then slowly coming back to the field of visual codes by way recollecting associated images in art, literature and music. Saavedra ends his compositions with titles quoted from songs or lines, giving his work the potency of poetry.

The Exiles opens on September 4, Thursday at 6 PM and will be on view until September 18, 2008.