Reybert Ramos at Art Stage Singapore
MANILA, Philippines - Reybert Ramos participates in this week’s Art Stage Singapore 2016 in Marina Bay Sands. His exhibition, “Interstices” will be on view at Galerie Stephanie’s booth (C4) from Jan. 21 to 24. Art Stage Singapore is the main component of Singapore Art Week, a prestigious occasion that has several visual art events lined up in the Lion City.
Ramos’ paintings outline the relationship of nostalgia and socio-political themes of the artist’s whole body of work, while attempting to reflect upon the central question of what’s at stake for painters today: “Has pluralism created an atomization that’s done away with a collective meaning?”
In this exhibition, Ramos attempts to view the impact of pop iconographry through the lens of specific items — particularly objects from within their realities, such as weapons. The artist’s paintings explore a direction akin to early avant-garde filmmakers whose works compile and appropriate a collage of imagery. Films of such are composed of visual quotations of history that have been removed from their contexts and placed end to end according to the filmmaker’s theme or argument.
“Interstices” follows this approach through his usage of historical pop film icons as his subjects. These paintings are portraits of some of Hollywood’s most iconic fictional characters. From portraits of Indiana Jones, Atticus Finch, and Terry Malloy, to Charlie Chaplin, the exhibit allows the viewer to perceive the images as if they were gazing through a looking glass. These portraits are then set side by side with paintings of objects (or symbols taken from the subject’s fictional worlds) of contrast and likeness — experimenting the conjunction between iconography and iconoclasm.
Ramos recycles images from Hollywood to purposely allow images to appeal to a collective meaning, focusing on what these pop characters symbolize within the society of their realities. These recycled images call attention to themselves as images, and as products of the image-producing industries of film and television. By reminding us that we are seeing images produced and disseminated by the media, these images open the door to a critical examination of the methods and motives underlying the media’s use of images.
For information, call Galerie Stephanie at 709-1488 or email info@galeriestephanie.com.
