Resonance (Febuary 4 - 21, 2010)

 

We derive aesthetic pleasure from a variety of modes: the realistic rendering of minute details; the reading of signs and deciphering of symbols; the color-filled optical massages; the expressed temperament in paint; the new twists, bends, and dips in the configuration of an idea. Art appreciation is a dance where the artist takes the lead.

Pure abstraction may be challenging for most to appreciate but it is also the simplest. It offers little clues, it likewise presents no distractions, it is candid and unpretentious- but it requires a ticket: to reach a point where we no longer ask what the elements of the composition mean and simply allow ourselves to be subject to the new form and experience that the works offer. To lose our bearings for the mean time, cast away our preconceptions- take what is freely given and swallow.

At times the subject matter is a verb; an act of finding the phenomena in our lives that resonate so we may create our own poetry.

 

{Un}Common (December 19, 2009 - January 9, 2010)

What is uncommon about John?

- Salvador Joel Alonday

 

 

The artist, possessed by an obsessive-compulsive mania for seeing value in any thing, collects even the debris of memory as mementos and afterward composes them in a box- to be fastened with clamps or clips and held secure with cords, tapes and lashes into a cohesive package of moments. He considers the leftovers, the reverse and unseen, the castaways; compartmentalizing the remains of the day into framed compositions of sheaths, peels, casings, cores and props –plus other detritus of human activity and consumption.

 

We are transformed by what we consume, and at the end of the day, shed off our cloths and recount the story of our daily transfigurations. Lazarus is absent here. Still, in the schematics of objective representation, a human figure is but an element, and there’s very little difference in the rendering of soft drapery or the subtle tones of a young woman’s skin, figuring the anthropometric proportions of a truck or the physique of Adam, expressing with paint and brush on canvas the etched leather countenance of one’s grandmother or the weathered physiognomy of wood and metal.

 

In the correlation between artist and audience, what contexts and meanings we put in- become elements in the process of what happens in that viscous space between the viewer and the work. For what is first instance in art but to give aesthetic form to chaos and put things in order for your consideration?

 

 

Makes Sense by Pam Yan-Santos (Nov. 27 - Dec. 15, 2009)

We set out on our cyclical walks to undetermined stations. Fate is dealt when the music stops, we settle into our seats fortuitously or not, and this then defines our individuality for the moment. Still, every cycle leads us back to the chair of the Happy Face Collector, counting the "smileys" of our resilience. This childhood diversion may well be a prelude to the journey of the grown-ups: The determined walk of a man weighed down by the duty of a family provider before the uncertainties of his quest. The sustained energy of a woman preserving a home where everything is in place, safe and sound. The roles we are expected to perform often find us unsuspecting and our senses unrehearsed. We count the hours until the shoes fit comfortably enough and in comes a new pair: A visitor from the past, clearly visible, announces its arrival with a prepared speech. He brings the future and she is hesitant to receive. What question to ask is the key to unlocking the door of her psyche but when to receive fate's revelation hangs suspended as a matter of choice. There are as yet more concerns, more layers to peel, tears to shed and a restless longing for the pumpkin fairytale to come true.

STILL (Oct. 29 - Nov. 15, 2009)
Erwin Leano paints the elemental pauses and intervals of the moment. Like the passage of thick nimbus over a cowering plain, each encounter hangs suspended and anxious even as the viewers remain sheltered in their private shells. We take this silent walk with the painter and notice an expectant chair against a bare wall, counting the hours with each shadow cast. We hear the veiled cry of a young girl on a stool - an overture to forgetting. We are lured into an open window - to bare shoulders that shed gestures and countenance to the periphery, pass the secret steps and immobile shadows behind slits of heavy wooden doors. The black umbrella shade comes to view through the vanishing point of an empty Sun-day crossroad. There is the dusk of melancholy in a solitary rocking chair left abandoned in the open, obscured by the browns of nostalgia transfixed like one figure in era costume pegged onto the concrete pavement of days gone by. Half-remembered landscapes with foliage markers on a topography of small feet and laboured walks lead to an abandoned folk carriage wading in the pool of history. Man is nostalgia, says Octavio Paz.

Markers (Sept. 24 - Oct. 24, 2009)

The stages of adult life, its pains and its triumphs, are the collective theme of Markers, an exhibition of stoneware sculptures by Salvador Joel Alonday.

 

Alonday, who has previously gained gained critical notice for his figurative works in resin and epoxy, turns to the organic medium of clay for this series, both as material and metaphor.  "Within clay is the residue of many things - bones, metals, trees – and fashioning images from it is like a resurrection, says Alonday.  Inspiration and subject matter come from the artist’s own experiences and he distills the essence of his past into poetic single forms whose figurative imagery are taken from diverse sources that includes religious art, myth, classical sculptures and folklore.

 

The sculptures depart from traditional pottery techniques as each were fired with different glazes, torched, assembled and welded onto wrought iron structures.  The resulting work consists of highly original textures and forms.

 

In choice of subject for this series, the artist tended towards the difficult, darker paths of existence, where his spirit was tested and survived.  Like his medium of choice, he commemorates hallowed events of darker nights, falls, the ebbing of life forces, follies and even death – and yet, also marking these way stations in the earthly pilgrimage, Markers also celebrates the triumph and resurrection of the will-to-live from fire and ashes.

 

Alonday is a recepient of the Metrobank Prize for Achievement in Sculpture (MPAS) in 2008.  He is a co-founder of Art Informal, a gallery and an art education center.

 

 

Aniwaas (September 3-20, 1009)
Sculptor Riel Hilario reinterprets the folk belief in the animating spirit in Aniwaas, an exhibit of his recent sculptures in wood. Aniwaas is an Ilocano term for the earthbound spirit. In ancient Ilocano mythology the aniwaas is one of the four souls believed to comprise the life-force of a living person, which is left behind in the earthly plane in the transition to the afterlife. Being fully attached to its former existence, the aniwaas lingers within its familiar environs and is said to inhabit the bodies of small animals, insects and even statues or pictures. For the artist, the animating principle of the aniwaas is a creative process in sculpture where the maker?s thoughts, memory and consciousness take residence in forms. The sculptor engages the concept of the aniwaas as a metaphor for the residual consciousness that lingers after the creation of a work, which brings an affective presence or living sense to the form. For Hilario, his aim as a sculptor is to make sculptures that ?seem to exist on their own will?. Aniwaas is the second of a series of wood sculptures on the four Ilocano souls, following his show Kadkaduwa in 2005. The exhibit is the artist?s eight solo show. Hilario studied santo-carving under Jose Lazo Jr. in Ilocos Sur in 1994 and took up painting and art history at the University of the Philippines. His wood sculptures were featured in the national traveling exhibit Sungdu-an 3 in 2003, a project of the national Commission for Culture and the Arts.

Tetano (August 13-30, 2009)

 

Metal is an element usually associated with toughness and durability. It has the ability to withstand severe (weather) conditions; hence, it is regarded as one of the major industrial materials. However, when exposed to moist and oxidation, metal's toughness vanishes and rusting occurs. And this causes the gradual but extensive dilapidation of a supposedly indestructible matter.

 

Contrary to popular belief, tetanus or lockjaw is not an ailment caused by rusty metals. It is actually a disease caused by a germ which forms spores and grows best where there is very little oxygen (Shryock, 1990). Rust lying on metal surfaces only serves as breeding ground for germs. But then these germs could penetrate through the wound, and in effect, one could suffer from mild infection to death.

 

In his fifth one-man art exhibition entitled Tetano, Carlo Gernale explores the aforementioned idea, the other facet of metal - its deterioration, decay, and irony. Gernale contemplates on the idea that toughness ends where a little rusting begins - much like what currently happens in Philippine society.

 

Gernale obtains inspiration from corroded roofing materials, decaying sheet metals, and rusted iron. He embeds the idea into the process called airbrush painting to create permanent rust (permanenteng pagkasira), to signify the permanence of corrosion of Philippine society, as the result of a decaying political system. ?

 

Anyo Dos (July 23 - August 9, 2009)

Anyo is an annual invitational exhibition of contemporary Philippine Sculpture, hosted by Artinformal and is now on its second year. ?This show features works of Salvador Alonday, Mel Araneta, Carlo Aranton, Glenn Cagantahan, Pablo Capati III, Joey de Castro, Noell EL Farol, Joe Geraldo, Riel Hilario, Stephanie Lopez, Dante Perez, Jon Pettyjohn, Tessy Pettyjohn, Mervy Pueblo, Jose Tence Ruiz, Adeo Sta. Juana, Alex Tee, and Mark Valenzuela

?

?

Welcome to the Jungle ( July 3 - 20, 2009)

A collection of works by 26 contemporary artists who came together out of friendship and camaraderie. ?After submitting his works, one of the artists in the show, Joe Christ, passed away. ?Art Informal would like to pay tribute to Joe

Himas mas

Artinformal opens Himas mas: a three-man Installation of Sculptures, Film Photography and Pottery by Joey de Castro, Pablo Capati III and Joe Geraldo on Thursday, May 14, 2009. 

 

“Himas mas” is an assemblage of reclaimed sensorial memory from the artists’ creative beginnings: retracing inspirational markers and stroking the mass of perceptual memoirs that feed their resolve to persist as Sculptor, Potter, Photographer- in the face of economic downtrends and socio-political uncertainties.

The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (April 16 - May 10, 2009)
Costantino Zicarelli; slowly emerging from the stark reductions of the "black and white" paintings, has added canny touches of color in his recent inquisition into the tomographics of thought vis-a-vis the formalist conventions of visual perception. "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste" opens on Thursday, the 16th of April at Art Informal with a selection of works in Oil on canvas and Mixed-media. The exhibit runs until May 10, 2009.

Passive Aggressive (March 18 - April 13, 2009)

Drawing inspiration from both ancient and sci-fi mythologies, the exhibition intends to create a re-articulated amalgamation of the two. Sculptural pieces which either appear like artifacts from some archaic civilization or products of some advanced alien world. There is an apparent theatricality and artificiality in the look of these pieces perpetuating our fictionalized conceptions of the past and future.

?

The show mainly consists of sculptural pieces - be it wall-bound relief, free-standing and/or suspended ? done in fiberglass, silicone and/or plastic. Sizes may vary from life-size to average toy-size. The show will be installed in such a way that it resembles a science museum of sorts.

Portraits (Feb. 26 - March 15, 2009)

The exhibition is a compilation of portraits of urban sensibilities. Intended as a parody of virtues and vices, the narrative is integrated in the play of elements evoking eastern Christian icons wherein the sacred merges with the mundane. Virtues co-exist with vices, a yin and yang, no clear cut delineation between good and evil. In the same vein, institutionalized concepts are fused with the fold indigenous.?

Surface encrustration typical of illuminations is recreated is recreated using fiberglass along with common place materials such as nuts and bolts, cables and metal castings.?

In direct contrast with a simultaneous exhibition featured at Avellana Gallery entitled ?Basilica? wherein relatively plain anthropomorphic posts are assembled to evoke a serene and meditative space, ?Portraits? deal with folk urban realities. Heavily textured, fragmented, and vibrant!

Arteries + Excavation (Feb. 5-22, 2009)

"Arteries", Mervy Pueblo's recent sculptures acts as arteries, akin to the systemic circulation of the cardiovascular system, that commutes her conscious selection of thoughts and experiences; analogous to the significant oxygen and blood, in search of purity or universality in art withdrawing from culture, tradition and politics.

Her work is a reflection of the relationship between sensation and creation. In her attempt to become free and purified by being non-accidental or casual, her hybrids are formed through her connection or sensitivity on to the medium unleashing its potential re-birthing.

Stone as her medium of choice, a less explored material in the local art scene, a writer named Ruben Cañete, describes "Mervy Pueblo's muscular forms defy the expectations one assumes about women's art".

Known for his glass sculptures, Noëll EL Farol presents his new cast glass and constructed steel as "assemblies" from recent archaeological "Excavation".

A crossover between sculpture and archaeology, which sought to bring out historical resonances, subtly traces earlier epochs and historical moments. The process of "excavation" is not simply the physical bringing to light of that which was lost or buried, but bringing to fore various ways of building new ways of being in the world, while directly engaging with the unresolved contraditions of the contemporary moment.

A dialogue between sculpture and archaeology, El Farol's "Excavation" have much to tell about archaeological and sculptural status of the fragment, the philosophy of place and question of site-specificity, and the idea of the artist as archaeologist

The Most Genuine Regret (December 11, 2008)
Known for pushing himself to the extreme, Tatong Recheta Torres mounts yet another crucial achievement with The Most Genuine Regret. Torres's third solo exhibition, The Most Genuine Regret consists of his penchant for characters in horrific physiological conditions and staged backdrops. Aside from his canvas-stills of random occurrences, he unifies them in a bizarre spatial experience of blob-sculptures suspended in mid-flight. The relationship between the figures that inhabits Tatong's paintings and the mysterious three-dimensional forms is that of deep seated conflicts of desire and regret, to satiate and to be forever haunted by it. The Most Genuine Regret opens at 6pm, 11 December 2008, Thursday in Art Informal.

Putaje

Fresh from their successful group exhibitions in Singapore and Malaysia , the six young visual artists from Antipolo, collectively known as Sangviaje: Jaypee Samson, Guerrero Habulan, Joven Mansit, John Paul Aantido, Edric Daniel and Dennis Fortozo, presents "Putaje", their 4th group exhibition which will open on November 11, 2008 at Art Informal.

Sangviaje explores the intertwining relevance of food with culture and society. For the artist group, the subjective premise is: "You are what you eat." They take this a step further in considering food as determinants of history's pedagogical system, religious perspectives, social structures, economics and globalization, politics and instinctive communal survival as part of the big picture.

From the first stage of food preparation down to its consumption, food distinctively distresses positions of individual persona as much as cultural identity. It has its effects on ethnic affiliation, gender constructs, notions of hierarchy, regional, micro-regional, caste systems and class based affiliations, national identity and so on. Food then can be used variously as a signifier of cosmopolitanism, globalism, localism, traditionalism or even nationalism.

Sangviaje analytically and satirically traverses the notion of food as culture and culture as food and what distinguishes it from other phenomena. Putaje opens on the 11th of November at 6PM.

ANYO (Oct. 23 - Nov. 8, 2008)

Artinformal launches its Annual Invitational Sculpture Exhibition with a gathering of Contemporary Filipino Sculptors. ANYO will feature the works of Augusto Albor, Salvador Joel Alonday, Noell EL Farol, Jose Tence Ruiz, Riel Hilario, Alma Quinto, Dan Raralio, Jon Pettyjohn, Renato Ong, Uly Veloso, Jo Geraldo, Leeroy New, Raymar Gacutan, Pablo Capati III, Pete Cortes, Joey de Castro, Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Mervy Pueblo, Stephanie Lopez, Anna Varona, Alex Tee, Angel Inocentes, Clinton Anniversario, Carlo Gernale, to name a few.

Wardrobe (October 2-20, 2008)
Recent works on canvas by Jim Orencio.

Soledad (October 2-20, 2008)
A solo exhibition by Erwin Leano featuring recent paintings in acrylic. The exhibit opens on October 2, Thursday and runs until October 20, 2008.

The Exiles

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.

Kotillion (July 31 - August 31, 2008)

Prancing About Artifice
 
By Eileen Legaspi - Ramirez
 
Jose Tence Ruiz's most recent suite of his now arguably signature corseted ballroom-goth denizens come conscripted in a choreographed frolic through defeat and demise.
 
With this sonorous reprise laced in a cotillion metaphor apparently standing-in for an eerie coming-of-age tale, we find this particularly un-cheery public coming-out party sullied by a patent fraying at the seams, referencing doomsday scenarios prefiguring globalized fossil fuel dystopia—of sinking artificial islands built up as grey landfills packing massed debris of industrial largesse. 
 
As in most of Ruiz's pieces from this and associated assemblings of his paintings as well as keenly calculated performances and installations, Kotilion reeks of a malodorous visual denouement, what the artist presages as alternately "bracing for impact" or as "means of buying time/escape," or a "method of lasting" through a perpetual onslaught of crises—man-made and otherwise.
 
The ominous scent trail visibly comes in measured doses, from subtly poetic to heavy-handedly didactic—the series being an extended working through of both artistic and polemic preoccupations ringing through Ruiz's practice over the past years since he re-established himself in the Philippines after taking up the expat-techpen route in Singapore.  
 
Taken together, Kotilion's frivolously sashaying characters do so to a dissonant waltz, in a macabre beating in time evoking the performative gestures of scowling dance directors brandishing iconically ominous clubs upon cowering lambient extremities gesticulating missteps.  
 
Curiously, this wily pageant of ruse peopled by:  the Ophelia tandem—Ophelia with Sports Utility Bomb and Homage to Milais's Ophelia; Bungeefixion; and the bluescreen-laden Ocean of Virtuality pieces; is not entirely underhanded given the none so subtle references to a transgeneration retinue of pop star figures (Sharon Cuneta, Gloria Romero, Kris Aquino, Nikki Gil, and Angel Locsin literally present in magazine cut-outs strewn across Ruiz's studio).  Such are the tongue-in-cheek jabs this artist throws to suggest the way crafted myths on tubes and screen outgloss our collective tragedies, palliatively assuaging looming fears of impending stunted debuts.
 

For despite his own pronouncements of his country turning into a mere amalgam of mercenary economic zones--where any real opportunities to make things come dissipated by lazy cop-outs to merely assemble or transit goods—despite the nagging presence of literal and metaphorical carcasses of human flesh, Ruiz still vaguely suggests the possibility of comeuppance such as in his adroit parody of Aquino's cosmetic and wide-spanning product endorsements.  And just as his bluescreen comes with tight associations of homogenized blockbuster cinematic excess, its semiotic flipside comes as blank projective ground—a blank surface that potentially takes upon itself stinging critique as easily as it does the campiness of virtual reality fictions spun by technocrat soothsayers.This trope of detritus masking the possible as well as the intractable congeals in Ruiz's remade work Ophelia with Sports Utility Bomb, where we find our heroine lounging in a junkyard padded with a patent class slant, of abandoned footwear unmistakenly casting one into type.
 
Thus this dance of desolation, while characteristically sullen, leaves quarter for a middling hope, says the artist himself:  "It would have to be an ability to distance from seduction, an ability to kick-float furiously awash in a tsunami of sensation never before offered for seemingly so little.  This elevation of despair into applied determination may be the stroke needed to metaphorically stay afloat in the deluge of dissipation which has unavoidably begun to flood in." (Ruiz, Ctrl+p, Determined Despair 2007)
 
As in the proverbial DI for hire, Ruiz seems to pose and pause, still bidding for individual agency in this grave "ocean of virtuality and speculation".

Have We Met? (July 3 - 21, 2008)

Michelle Pauline Lim and Marga Rodriguez explore the nuances of personal and virtual human interactions with an exhibition of paintings and mixed-media works.

RANDOM SOLILOQUY

Some women have this habit of cutting their hair after a harrowing experience - the remnants of trauma have somehow slithered down the ends of their tresses and they strut tenaciously to the hairdresser for psychic emancipation with a pair of scissors – and it works!”

“There are just too many faces in the world that exhibit multiple personalities, and you are one of mine.”

“The tree of life, according to Filipino mythology, is the first creation and stands alone on top of the highest mountain - that is where the souls, after a long journey, would announce their arrival by gnawing at its bark. The tree may also be likened to a ladder to the heavens; from bright red and juicy to gnarled and woody, our awakenings and transcendences – savoured in the mouth.”

“We branch out from a diagram of hierarchy beginning with Adam and Eve- to reach the high heavens. One day, the world will collapse from all that weight. ”

“Sometimes, I feel like wires are starting to sprout from my body like tendrils.”

“Last night, my Mac showed signs of schizophrenia –
So I shut him down.”

“I had deeper thoughts as a child until I gave in to adult proscriptions. I was afraid to grow up and become like ‘them’ but I had nowhere else to go! This all happened when; while I was playing ‘tag’ with my shadow, a monkey stole my ruby slippers and the white rabbit- that cute little creature, skipped past fast and was much too quick to catch bare-footed...”

by Salvador Joel Alonday

Recollections (Feb. 1-18, 2008)

In the exhibition, Recollections, artist Marina Cruz-Garcia once again explores the theme of memory.  She elves into poignant but jettisoned memories of her relations, recreating them on canvas with new and realized significance to deliver an intimate contribution in family history.  Each piece retells a story through Marina's perspective.  Whether lonely or charming, sweet or bittersweet, the records Marina narrates become shaped into her own.  Tinted in a brown glaze that induces an air of nostalgia, the works offer an expressive disclosure of reminiscences that touch upon Marina's circle of loved ones.

-text by Clarissa Olizon Chikiamco-

Passages by Erwin Leano (Dec. 10-30, 2007)

Erwin's subtle use of colors, controlled brushwork and serene compositions reveal the artist's refined temperament and unobtrusive manner.  His paintings offer, not mere windows to a visible world but a state of mind - a transient stillness or a pause in the daily course of noise and haste,

He invites us to walk through corridors and pavements with stark walls that seem to resonate whispered voices and silent footsteps, past solitary doors and peripheral flights of steps suggestive of commas to a quiet narrative - a virtual passage into a state of calm.

Luwalhati: Anniversary Group Show (June 14 - 30, 2008)

Art Informal celebrates its anniversary with a group exhibition of works by 50 Filipino artists. Participating artists are Leo Abaya, Gus Albor, Lina Alcid, Salvador Joel Alonday, Benjie Cabangis, Zean Cabangis, Buen Calubayan, Pablo Capati III, Ronald Caringal, Joey de Castro, Joey Cobcobo, Marika Constantino, Marina Cruz-Garcia, Rene Cuvos, Igan D’Bayan, Noell El Farol, Alfred Esquillo, Sandra Fabie-Gfeller, Tina Fernandez, Mark Andy Garcia, Erwin Leano, Romeo Lee, Michelle Lim, Stephanie Lopez, Nikki Luna, Neil Manalo, Ferdinand Montemayor, Jason Moss, Sam Penaso, Von Ng, Aleth Ocampo, Renato Ong, Jim Orencio, Anthony Palomo, Jaco Payawal, Mervy Pueblo, Tatong Recheta Torres, Carlo Angelo Saavedra, Jerson Samson, Jose John Santos III, Pamela Yan-Santos, Rodel Tapaya, Alex Tee, Jose Tence Ruiz, Gino Tioseco, Juanito Torres, Anna Varona, MM Yu, and Costantino Zicarelli.

The exhibit opens on Saturday, June 14 and runs until June 30. Art Informal is located at 277 Connecticut St., Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City. For inquiries, sms 0918-899-2698 or call 725-8518.

Homemade Relics (May 6-20, 2008)

Painter Carlo Angelo Saavedra calls his new works “imperfect objects”. The treatment of the paintings is far from standard: frames hacked with a dull axe; paint overflowing the canvas limits; suggested figures emerging from a coat of mud-like mixtures; surfaces abused with the constant process of trial and error.

Saavedra holds that his aim is not to deconstruct or to deface. According to the artist, it is quite the opposite. Working with salvaged wooden frames and old paintings, Saavedra gives these found objects or subject matters new identities as instruments to an evolution of the creative process. “I’m never iconoclastic”, he says. “The job of a painter is to make a memorable painting - not to vandalize.”

And despite a number of people always commenting that his paintings never veer away from the macabre, Saavedra insists that he is, above all, optimistic. Inspired by poetry and what e.e. Cummings describes as “a fascination with the verb and the movement it creates in language”, Saavedra points out his own fascination with the synesthetic quality of poetry and how within this idea, there resonates something autobiographical.