A man is seated on a small chair, hunched over, the load on his back pushing his chest further down toward the floor. His figure is echoed infinitely on his right side and while we know this is all illusion and playful gesture we are still bothered by the repetition, his impotence. This work was one of Mark Justiniani’s earliest experiments with magic or, as the artist himself would gladly reveal: careful and faultless placement of light, mirror and object, really “only a tenth of what you see.”
Justiniani’s maneuvering of materials from oil on wood to jeepney designs, sculpture, installation, animation, and optics has taken us from burdened and bored men floating in midair to a freakishly huge slingshot ready to aim sweaty, severed heads to oblivion. Always we find ourselves in his work exploring worlds laden with puns and tricks, pain, ennui, and clever diversions.
His work for Art Fair Philippines 2016 is a continuation of his “Mimefield” series, a suite of what he calls “constructions,” “edifices being built,” that employ optical bluffs and techniques. They are “a celebration of mimicry,” he says and “a combination of fragment with mirage or illusion.”
“Mimefield” hovers amidst discordant claims at truths and overlapping worlds. Alluding to Plato’s mimesis — one of the earliest views on the nature of art — Justiniani’s works embrace doubt and approximations, the distance between imagination and reality.
Fascinated by physics and the curious weightlessness of atoms, Justiniani shares, “Atoms are 99.999 percent nothing… and yet we see things as solid.” He says, “There are no colors, no sounds, no tastes... what we see as blues aren’t really blues...”
This phenomena is often explained in the domain of science, removed from art and religion which seem to operate within more similar realms. The artist reminds us, however, that the three are kindred spirits.
One of his works, “Temple,” demonstrates this permeation of terrains. It is the union of two structures of worship: on one side “the cathedral of science,” a scale model of the biggest of the Large Hadron Collider’s atom-smashers that attempt to study the origins of matter and, on the other, a dreamlike composite of empty cathedral corridors. What teases us is how these two institutions that now “share a slice of space, of infinities” are also unfinished. We notice spotlights and supports on the corners intimating their configuration and exposing the trick. What is unsettling and elegant are collapsed: beliefs topple into each other.
Justiniani recalls that it is his father’s exactitude and practicality as a mechanical engineer that he now sees influencing his work. Driven by honesty and the weight of the subjects he chooses, he is also currently engrossed with the idea of gravity. “That it’s the curvature of space that keeps us all in place — it totally changed my thinking. It shifted my attention from matter to space, to nothing!”
Before we leave, he asks me, “Okay lang ba mag-deviate?” He talks about his fascination with Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity, how reality as we experience it is actually so unstable, so dauntingly conditional. The fact that we sometimes forget this excites the artist.
“You see those people walking?” He notions to three men walking past us on their way to lunch. “Time is slower for them than it is for us.”
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Mark Justiniani is part of the Art Fair Philippines 2016’s Special Exhibitions opening on Feb. 18, Thursday. The fair runs until Feb. 21 at Levels 5, 6 and 7 of The Link Carpark, Parkway Drive, Ayala Ave., Makati City. For information, visit http://artfairphilippines.com/.
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‘Notes from Purita: Philippine Art in a Wider Field’ by Patrick D. Flores
The lecture revisits the thesis of the founder of the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP), Purita-Kalaw Ledesma, for her master’s in Education at the University of the Philippines titled “A Critical Analysis of Modern Painting in the Philippines Today.” It is through this seminal text written in 1955 that an arc of Kalaw-Ledesma’s concerns may be traced: criticism, history, exhibition making, and institution building. More particularly, it focuses on the framework within which modernism became a privileged discourse in the AAP through the criteria of its competitions and consequently shaped the history of art and its criticism after the Pacific War. It finally tries to compare this kind of aesthetic education through modernism under the auspices of the AAP with the other forms of pedagogy at the Ateneo de Manila through Fernando Zobel and at the University of the Philippines through its emerging Humanities program. All these efforts helped form vital institutions of art in terms of the production of art, of the knowledge of art, and of its critical reflection in history.
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The lecture is tomorrow, Feb. 16, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Part of the inaugural activities of the new Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Center, it is also held in partnership with Art Fair Philippines 2016. The Center is at the 8th floor, KL Tower, 117 Gamboa Street, Legaspi Village, Makati City. Admission is free but only 60 seats are available. For reservations, call 843-2696 or email kalawledesmagroup@yahoo.com.