A thin line between painting and sculpture

Works that use line as the primary compositional device are featured at two ongoing exhibits at the West Gallery in SM Megamall and at the Glorietta.

At the SM Megamall are the works of Dan Raralio in an exhibition entitled Copper Field, while at the Glorietta are Powerlines of Christina Quisumbing Ramilo. Both favor the strong presence of lines in their works, yet approached in ways that are distinct from one another.

In Copper Field, Raralio’s works are remarkable for their highly tactile quality. The works assume an almost sculptural form – the lines that inhere in the paintings are either chiseled or impasto-ed on generous color fields of blues and reds.

The ingenious, if not unconventional, use of copper as a painting surface provides the works warm and fiery luster. The deep and intense glow of copper contrasts the thick pasty texture of the impasto mixture – creating a unique visual and tactile synergy.

The rich visual accents on the artist’s works stem from the unique combination of materials and media and the process harnessed for the nine-piece collection of what the artist refers to as "impasto paintings." The luxuriant surface, built upon layers and layers of acrylic, modeling paste, polymer paint, marble dust and sand, becomes a hospitable ground for the very spontaneous and gestural painting process.

As focal point, the copper field provides the stimulus of the painting process, starting with a playful doodling on its surface. This playfulness is continued on throughout the canvas with free flowing gestural strokes converging to the copper field. These strokes cut through the thick multi-layered surface of the canvas creating spontaneous yet precise incisions.

The iconography is devoid of any association with the external world. Rather, the images are embodiments of the creative urge to explore and conceive of autonomous artistic realities that, for all intents and purposes, are personal and private expressions reflecting the artist’s moods and states of mind at a given time and space.

Powerlines, on the other hand, are planar as they are painterly. Like Raralio’s works, the colors in Quisumbing’s works are just as intense. The difference, however, is in the evenness of the pictorial surface which stands out. The textured surfaces, which in some instances are glazed, are realized through layers of pasted sheets of personal letters or printed pages of a vintage book the artist got from a secondhand bookstore.

For Powerlines, the artist presented 11 oil on canvas paintings based on photographs and memory. The vertical image of the electrical power lines is used to symbolize movement, connections and energy.

Quisumbing, now based in New York, associates power lines with travel. Growing up in the Philippines, she would see power lines outside the car window as robots and giants on family trips as a child. In her teens, together with friends, she would pass by the familiar forms, and the same structures triggered different images – soldiers, women in saya, mannequins and religious icons.

For the artist, there is tension between the progressive function of technology and industry as suggested by powerlines, and the rural quality of the giants in her childhood memory. It is interesting how these menacing structural sculptures are strategically placed in vast open spaces, rice fields, mountainsides and suburban and urban landscapes: Contradictory elements playing an environmental tug-of-war.

Through the works, Quisumbing examines the nature of her own experience in remembering these figures. The text in the paintings is meant to be recognized but not read, like a layer of visual sound.

The structures are also symbolic of the concept of balance. Powerlines are still and at the same time have energy flowing within them. For the artist, they are both static and in motion – a symbol of contained dynamism.

Amazingly, through Powerlines, Quisumbing manages to allow gender issues to inform her works, a recurring concern in her art. In her smaller works in the collection, the iconic simplicity of electrical lampposts is harnessed to limn female genitalia.

Raralio is a Thirteen Artist awardee of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and an awardee of the 2003/2004 Freeman Foundation Asian Artist Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in the US. He has widely exhibited locally and internationally. Quisumbing obtained her masters degree in Studio Arts and Art Education from New York University. She now resides in Jackson Heights in Queens. Both are graduates of the UP College of Fine Arts.

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For comments, send e-mail to ruben_david.defeo@up.edu.ph.