The career trajectory of JJ Acuña reads like a global odyssey—one that stretches from a quiet Texas suburb to the skylines of Hong Kong and, most recently, Manila. Across each locale, he honed an approach he calls “spatial DNA”. It’s a bespoke methodology that weaves client aspirations, cultural context, and intuitive materiality into environments that […]
Artinformal Opens Three New Exhibits for January
In January, Artinformal Gallery in Makati debuted three new exhibits, inviting audiences to explore fresh perspectives shaped by the artists’ personal experiences. These emotional explorations offer refreshingly unique artworks that pose thought-provoking questions about selfhood and artistic expression.
‘Tethers of a whole’
Tosha Albor’s Tethers of a whole functions as the most exciting piece in the January lineup of Artinformal Gallery. Its singular monoprint work “Sea, me, and sandscapes” is huge and imposing, occupying almost half of the exhibit space.
This painting can be divided into four sections—its top two sections are blue, while the bottom sections are yellow. Specks of green appear in some of the panels in yellow half. In all of them, an uninterrupted string of white swirls through each sections.
It operates like a provocative, charged work, mainly because of the wildness of how it looks. The white swirls around unencumbered, the colors seep through messily in different sections. Taken as a whole, it mixes the emotionality of the artist with the physicality that comes with crafting murals like this.
“I’m currently exploring the concept of wholeness and what it offers to my sense of self,” the artist said. “How does it feel to be whole? What are the sensations, tension, conflict or fantasies that bring me to it, or prevent me from getting closer? And how does this shape my relationship to self and others?”
‘Tagpi-Tagpi, Dugtong-Dugtong’
“Do automatons dream of divinity?”
For Ryan Jara’s latest exhibit at Artinformal Gallery, there’s a mix of styles and ideas that work to interrogate our relationships with religion and divinity. Many of the works combine a Victorian steampunk aesthetic and surrealistic weirdness to highlight the message of selfhood Jara wanted to communicate.
When he discussed his artworks in this exhibit with BluPrint, he said that he aimed to portray a sense of reconnection with the divine that today’s generation has lost, and the resilience of people who stand true to themselves despite opposition from the world.
Jara’s imagery here puts his subjects in a workshop, slowly being rebuilt piece by piece into a whole human being. We see them in different states of progress, their faces twisted around into contortions. Jara said that the facial imagery was inspired by sliding puzzle games, where the image looks distorted until it is assembled correctly.
In some of the paintings, statues of iconic Catholic figures like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II litter the workshop. It represents the ways we craft our own way at times, separate from the expectation of others. It links the divine and the mortal together, a way of refining the self to create a new evolution of purpose in our world today.
‘Freak Off’
The first exhibit of former writer Masi Oliveria, Freak Off plays with popular notions of scientists and the scientific method, merging them with popular culture to forge a Frankenstein’s monster-esque amalgamation of the two.
Oliveria’s exhibited works for Artinformal Gallery mixes so many different cultural touchstones that it feels dizzying to discuss. The exhibit includes depictions of scientists at Gothic castles, monster figures in mundane situations, philosophers, religious figures, and even mythological creatures posing in modern ways.
One work has the Greek god Pan posing in jeans and a shirt, mimicking Kendrick Lamar’s GNX cover. Another work has different philosophers seemingly looking at the viewers and masturbating. A Cthulhu figure bakes in the kitchen in one painting, while another shows people drinking around the Necronomicon.
Oliveria shared that the original concept centered around scientists, but as her inspirations veered towards different ideas, she saw it as a way of subverting the tendency of the scientific method to be straightforward. The exhibit certainly feels like an embrace of influences, intersecting them in unexpected ways.
“ I used to write and I’m very interested in creating narratives,” she said. “Gusto ko yung painting kasi hindi siya dapat a narrative. You can’t really read the beginning and middle and end. […] What I [like] about painting is that you can actually make so many interconnections: you can jump from here to there and then it will have a different meaning if you go from there to here.”
New Scrutinies on the Self
These three exhibits at Artinformal Gallery revel in a sense of specificity in how each artist views their own experiences. The exhibits are enjoyably unique and oft-kilter, and many reveal the personal preoccupations of the artists, whether it’s pop culture or how we relate to ourselves or how we relate to our surroundings.
This varied broadness functions well to stimulate the minds of its audience, inviting them to seek new angles in forming and reforming our own identities to others (and ultimately, ourselves).
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: ‘Revirescence’: Jill Paz Deconstructs Environmental Wonders in New Exhibit
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