FORMS create new patterns, which leads to new meanings. In romance, people explore what’s unexplored to create new experiences. This then leads to new meanings.
Love is exuding as sunlight is emitting, similar to the individual perceptions of reality that are naturally expressed into tangible forms. This process is called Form-Finding.
Natural processes help discover a more correct way, a right manner to let love’s light shine from within, and then out to the world. It is passionate, sensual, and sometimes erotic. This is called Form-Making.
Form-Finding and Form-Making are gifts of discovering optimum forms of love, allowing for the creation of unique relationships among certain elements until brand new meanings emerge.
This February 27, 2021, fall in love with every form available – with every line, shape, color, texture, pattern, and even space on artworks by Joel Geolamen, Kublai Milan, Jeff Bangot, and Tanya Gaisano Lee.
Artists Joel Geolamen and Kublai Millan explore Form-Finding as their artworks portray the beloved fabrics of Mindanao where patterns emerge and reveal new meanings.
Artists Jeff Bangot and Tanya Gaisano Lee explore Form-Making with artworks that attempt to express one of the spectrums of love in the most optimum way possible.
Romancing with Forms is a new experience of discovery and of love that is both inwards as it is outwards. Join us at TheBau Haus Gallery, Doña Vicenta Road, Bajada, Davao City, 4 p.m.
Form Finding
Tangled Dreams by Kublai Millan
Tangled Dreams is an example of the artist’s Shedding: the exhibited series of paintings on canvass featuring overlapping textile patterns are essentially ‘dead skin cells,’ the real art being in the artist’s process of exploring possibilities in motif (and meaning) with this act of entanglement. It is both a playful exercise in serendipity, and a frustrated pursuit of new forms by re-imagining the old.
The patterns used are from textile traditions that conceive motifs through dreaming. The artist’s deliberate choice of tapping into traditional motifs also makes this series a somber reflection on the state of art itself.
Rather than following the trend towards conservatism, the artist chooses instead to re-imagine traditional patterns as opportunities for contemporary abstraction. As they are overlaid on top of one another, the dreams behind their design collide.
The result is a disorderly web of motifs that no longer belong to any tradition but which suggest both the modern urban person’s chaotic uprootedness and the endless possibilities offered to the unbound.
In this collision of dreams, the artist not only invites, but challenges the viewer to actively trace fresh hope, connectivity, and possibilities out of each layered painting.
As they interconnect, the dreams and imaginations of people often end up in a tangled mess. Resisting against received notions of harmony and order, the artist sees this entanglement -- a big part of our contemporary reality -- as a fertile source of new expression.
Kabilin by Joel Geolamen
In powerful Settler creativity, Joel Geolamen re-imagines the textile traditions of Mindanao in his Kabilin series, mountain landscapes made of colorful cloth rendered in oil on canvas.
At once rooted and modern, Kabilin is a fresh take on the relationship between nature and the arts. Lumad and Moro textiles are often made with materials sourced from nature, and depict motifs inspired by natural images. The artist inverts this dynamic, depicting the source as the product, subtly asserting that the beauty of human creation is on par with the beauty of natural scenery.
Geolamen strikes several delicate balances in this series. He navigates between sensitivity to heritage and the re-imagining of tradition. But as he depicts as accurately as possible the traditional textiles, he also has to skillfully render the contours of the mountain landscapes he is making out of these fabrics. It is the unique burden of the Settler artist to know how to make realistic ridge lines out of Inabals and Inauls.
The grandson of Patadjong weavers from Antique, Geolamen continues his own Settler textile heritage by making art inspired by the Lumad and the Moro. In this exhibit, mountains and ranges are depicted as Blaan and T’boli Tabih and the Yakan Seputangan.
Form Making
Beyond Naked by Tanya Gaisano-Lee
Tanya Gaisano Lee’s Beyond Naked is the taming of human desire to run amuck. The series celebrates the rendezvous of raspy craving and quiet beauty, and delicately takes a moment to lay bare the tantalizing nature of intermingling adult human bodies.
Using ink and acrylic, Tanya reflects the sensual union of two unlikely mediums in intimate harmony. The art then lies not in the depiction of the carnal but of the coming together of unique individuals with varying characteristics and histories engaged in a unifying pact -- one in the moment.
Flat colors in Beyond Naked suggest calm, familiarity, and focus.
Nonetheless, what’s suggested, too is the confusion of multiple pleasures coming from different directions while still being fixated on a certain spot—all through the patterns of black and white spread across certain zones in the painting. These black and white patterns are also reminiscent of TV screens left on beyond the signing off of channels: it’s deep in the night; a long night ahead nonetheless.
Beyond Naked exposes yet leaves so much to the imagination. It brings the viewer to the experience but at the same distances. The faceless persons in the paintings facilitate transfer of identities from viewer to subject, yet at the same time puts the viewer back where they stand and question their own engagement in their own intimate experiences.
This illustrates that nakedness, for Tanya, is beyond exposed private affairs but an examination of our private selves, the forms we are making, and the lingering effects they have on ourselves and to our partners.
May Pa Ang Painting Naay... by Jeff Bangot
Sanaol na lang tingali ang malitok sa makasilip sa mga reyalistikong pamintal ni Jeff Bangot, kon asa iyang gipadayag ang kumpas ug dulot sa lamiang indayog sa mga nag-usang mga nilalang.
Tua gyud sa ibabaw si Bangot sa iyang kamaayo mutira og anatomiya, mga daw mura nag tinuod nga mga tawo ang tua sa mga kwadrado. Gamayng tikang lang palayo, ug mura na kag galantaw og saligang makapadasig.
Sa luyo aning mga makapahingaphingap nga mga pintal, dunay gamayng ibog nga mabati ang naglantaw -- may pa ang painting naay buwak, may pa ang painting naay alibangbang, ug may pa ang tawo sa painting kay nag-letrang O ang baba.
Nagpatong-patong ang mga paghulagway ni Bangot sa kon unsa ang dagway sa kalami sa gugma sa dihang hikalimtan na sa naghigugmaay ang palibot, ug sa higayong naa na sila sa lawak nga daw ilang kalibotan nga sila rang naghigugmaay ang maoy mga tawo.
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Romance with Forms exhibit will run until March 12, 2021.