Causal Loops is a sight to behold. The new exhibit by artist Bernardo Pacquing, showing in Silverlens Manila from June 11 to July 13, showcases a messy, overwhelming grandness that one would be hard-pressed to see anywhere else. Bernardo Pacquing created an exhibit with a sense of scale to it that makes one feel like they’re walking through the ruins of a city.
The artwork presented in this exhibit points toward the urban shape of our society. It abstracts the building blocks of a metropolis—cement and gravel, sticks and wood and rubble from a construction site—and turns them inward into a personal reflection , finding the beauty within its shapes.
Pacquing’s abstract style focused on shapes and “found objects.” In their write-up for the exhibit, Josephine V. Roque says that the artist’s work is informed by their upbringing in Sampaloc, Manila, where “gritty, seemingly unpolished textures” abound. “It is what philosopher Bernard Bosenquet calls a ‘difficult beauty,’ referring to the kind that is not immediately apparent to the senses and requires the challenge of patience and time to perceive.”
With Causal Loops, one sees this ruin of time in action for many of the pieces. The artist uses the construction materials in a way that creates this odd look of preservation in the artworks.
The centerpiece “Lottery of Birth,” for example, looks akin to a cityscape messily preserved with cement. There’s an intentionality there in how it layers and combines the wood and rocks and tools together. Looking at the painting, one feels the way time washes and destroys our selfhood as we become a part of the collective whole.
Beyond that, the artist constructs strange sculptures that find new meaning and use for what many consider trash. “A Singular Path to Surviving Truth and Logic #1-6,” for example, uses sacks of construction cement, large and small pieces of wood, rope, and other objects to create these immutable sculptures that defy easy definition.
Some of them, one would daresay, appeal to a Dadaist sense of rejection to the idea that an artwork needs an aesthetic reason to exist. It feels like Bernardo Pacquing made these to show that the value of something isn’t in its use. Instead, he offers the idea that existence itself is the value of something, because it allows the evolution of objects beyond their original reasoning. What was once used for construction finds new life in art. Existence is meaning.
And even then, within the exhibit itself, these works communicate the same notes about time and ruin as everything else. It stands still, eternal, a representation of the strange beauty that can be found in the ugliness.
With “What I Have Learned from my Paintings #1-3,” meanwhile, the artist looks to impose order in the untidiness. Pacquing assembles the same materials in a way that hints a sense of purpose to the works. It works as commentary on his past paintings, as he mimics the abstraction but with non-paint materials—and finding the same core meaning to it anyways.
Much of the material just pops out in interesting ways, from the rope in the first one to the wooden detritus in the third. More than anything else in the exhibit, these works feel the most alive in how they interact with the world.
What one notices is the horizontal lines in the works that exist off-center. It feels precise without being so, allowing itself to be guided by the materials instead of a ruler. It’s reminiscent of a quote in Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans that he attributes to John Ford: “When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit.”
In many ways, Causal Loops is art as architecture, a precise construction larger than humanity itself. Only it refuses to find practical reasons for its design, finding new uses for old materials that are shunned aside.
Related reading: Bernardo Pacquing’s “Disquietude” Exhibit at Silverlens
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