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 […]
‘Horror Vacui’: Two Artists Transform Personal Anxieties into Escapism
Horror Vacui, painter Paolo Torres’s newest exhibit at Vinyl at Vinyl, is goofy and animated, reminiscent of old Looney Tunes shorts. Torres’s work brings this new spin at cartoonish anarchy that hides deeper feelings of anxiety in its frenetic look.
Torres collaborates with poet Ray Santiago, who provides multiple poems that link to specific paintings within the exhibit. Both seem intent on carving out a place where artistry stands in for the anxiety they feel, never stating out loud the specificity of these emotions.
“These cartoonish figures bare incompleteness, alluding to the strength in vulnerability, as packaged in the artist’s rough and intricate style,” the exhibit write-up said. “The poems depict a voice that is in recollection – a carousel of memories that, at its core, bear a scathing poignance of loneliness.”
Anxieties Put to Bed
Horror Vacui translates in Latin as “fear of empty spaces.” And one does see that ethos in Torres’s work, with their expertly-handled chaotic scenery evocative of psychedelic art and underground comix.
For the artist, they describe the stylistic choices as “brooding torsos; decapitated; riddled with stains and scribbles to emulate emotions like emptiness and uncertainty.”
The works drip with stars and abstract backgrounds of dirtied-up, muted colors. These disheveled backgrounds contain nothing linear about its presentations. At times, the stormy background reminds one of old, scratched-up film.
Torres fills the paintings with eccentric, headless figures that appear to represent the destructive lack of agency people have. A headless cat gets a pair of eyes and a mouth floating in front of where its face should be; one painting gives a couple flower heads while they smoke.
The artist draws these figures with peculiar poses and dimensions that make them look energetic. One painting gives audiences a whole body that looks like a nude Mario figure, with stars covering its head and other nude areas of the body in strategic ways. Pairing the background and the figures together add up to a memorable experience for viewers of the pieces.
Comfort for the Vulnerable
Each painting appears to join itself with a poem from Santiago. The gallery gives visitors browsing copies with the poems as they enter the exhibition. Many of the poems talk of the despair of living, sometimes adding a new dimension to the paintings they are paired with.
One painting has a headless woman with a wing instead of a left arm, planted in a vase. Leaves and flowers cover the torso’s breasts as other white flowers grow around the body. Their corresponding poem, “Big Vase,” sets a theme of objects discarded by society.
“a space for hiding, claustrophobic, crushing, comforting, embracing/ dreams buried, kept/ broken things, forgotten things, kept things, thrown things, and all things,” Santiago wrote.
The poems take on themes of abandonment, and imbue the paintings with grief existing below the veneer of anxious cartoony energy within it. The works are poignant and honest with how unbalanced the world makes them feel. “Maybe I am dying now. But I don’t want to remember,” Santiago wrote for the title poem “Horror Vacui.”
Horror Vacui explodes with grief, finding comfort in the bizarre, fun grotesque pieces that the two artists fill the world with. Visitors can be dazzled with the eccentric artworks, and devastated with the piercing poems. However one sees the works, it allows us enjoyment in art that visualizes the personal demons of its artists.
Related reading: ‘Rituals of Recovery’: Honing into the Practices of Self-Care
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