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‘Clarence Chun x Luis Lorenzana’ Merges Two Eccentric Styles
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For Clarence Chun x Luis Lorenzana, Mono8 Gallery director Gwen Bautista envisioned a way for the two artists to reclaim their own selfhood after decades of different influences and pivots in their own line of work. She believes that the two artists, coming from a place of respect, could challenge each other on their art and how to move forward.
“I like the idea that both of them come from very different foundations in their practice,” Bautista said. “Clarence is heavily academically trained. And then Luis, on the other hand, is self-taught. But at the same time, they’re both now at the level of their practice where that doesn’t really matter anymore. And it’s really more now about trying to reclaim themselves away from all of those learnings.”
The new exhibit is a celebration of both of these artists’ careers. But it also attempts to show us how a collaboration for the two makes sense. For the selected past works, it doesn’t just communicate their past achievements, but their stylistic similarities and differences that allow them to pop in the eyes of the viewer.
And once viewers see the collaborative works, they can easily understand the push-and-pull within the final product. It gives further context into the ideas of the actual collaborative paintings, and illuminates just how these two distinctive artists created these works.
Fractured Memories
Clarence Chun x Luis Lorenzana could not have more different artistic styles. Chun specializes in abstraction; his paintings attempt to portray feelings and memories of the past.
It leads to works which have a glitchy, explosive look, constantly busy with colors and emotions. Chun himself said that this allows him to create paintings with strong emotional resonance, even if it’s not consistent with what actually happened. What matters is what stuck with him, and whatever digressions he can relate to it along the way.
“Whenever you remember something, right, you don’t remember the whole thing, you just remember a certain part, a certain piece,” Chun said. “Like, if I tell you, like one day, when you were younger, when you were going out with your mom, you don’t remember the whole trip. You just remember a certain part, whether she got you ice cream or whatever.
“That’s where the fracturing comes from, where I can only remember parts of that memory and I will just paint that. That’s why it’s kind of fractured, because you’re only recounting the parts that you remember.”
Simplified Methods
Lorenzana, meanwhile, had a varied history into finding his own art style. He started with fine art with a hint of graffiti, before becoming interested in traditional baroque portraiture. He received acclaim from that, but by 2016, he felt unchallenged by the paintings.
“This one, I can say, with eyes closed, [I can paint it easily].”
His most recent experimentations and paintings work to simplify the idea of portraiture. Moving away from the baroque style that made him famous, he crafts flatter, simpler paintings that reduces the amount of flourish and specificity without removing the feelings and emotions of a moment. It’s a very interesting stylistic choice, one as enamored with technique as his baroque portraits, but less.
“My normal process is, my eyes normally see things in 3D, but the more you learn, the more flatter your attempts to create those visual languages. Flatter. Simpler,” he said. “And then it came to a point wherein the most important thing for me is just the composition, the texture, and the color, and the surface.
“And then, shapes and lines so that the shadow and the dramatic things that you add to your vein… Before, I was so fascinated with artworks that have narratives. But now it’s more on the technical aspect of painting.
“So, that’s it. My fascination now is ‘the simplest the form, the more interesting the texture.’”
Merging Techniques
As both of them were searching for new challenges to conquer, something like Clarence Chun x Luis Lorenzana became inevitable. Both of them were familiar with each other’s works and both respected the other’s craft. Thus, they jumped at the opportunity to work together on their first collaborative exhibit.
For the three collaborative paintings produced for the exhibit, Chun would work on the first layer first before Lorenzana would add another layer to the work, and so on. Chun said that both of them were overly-respectful of each other’s contributions.
“Both of us were so respectful that I didn’t want to—I actually covered, I cellophaned his abstractions so I wouldn’t get any of my paint on top. And then, he didn’t want to ruin the surface, because I guess he liked the surface that I painted for him. I wanted a clean surface so he has a nice surface to paint on, yeah. But he didn’t want to do that,” Chun said.
“He didn’t want to, like, destroy it. I wanted him to actually destroy it. But he’s so respectful that he didn’t want to do that.”
The end product for the three paintings merges Chun’s fractured abstractions with Lorenzana’s simplified portrait-like faces in random parts of the canvas. Though their styles feel too neatly boxed in from each other to bring any sort of chaos to the work, it still feels like a true collaboration, as both of them contribute their own methods and ideas without overpowering each other.
New Challenges and Horizons
Clarence Chun x Luis Lorenzana works for viewers as a primer to the past works of these illustrious artists, and as a perspective on how they merge ideas and work together for the new creation of art. But it possibly works best for Chun and Lorenzana as a great way to challenge themselves, allowing them new horizons to explore in their practice.
“It’s more of two artists allowing themselves to be placed in control and also bring a lot of respect to each other in making a collaboration piece,” Bautista said. “It’s very difficult because, especially for abstract artists, it’s really more of an expression, but for them to be able to hold certain pieces of the canvas for the other is something that is really what we want to see in this exhibition.
“That’s the point of us having to put two artists together to collaborate. It’s like the sharing of space. It’s like allowing themselves to feel what the other is feeling in their works.”
Clarence Chun x Luis Lorenzana is open till November 26.
Photos by Elle Yap.
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