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‘Points and Endings’: Keka Enriquez Paints Domesticity to Vivid Life
Points and Endings, shown at Silverlens Manila, portrays the hecticness of the household of Keka Enriquez. She finds a way to represent the lived-in energy of the house, contrasting against more polished portrayals of one’s home as seen in the media. It’s unruly and active and alive, finding a rhythm that suggests comfort in one’s surroundings.
This is Enriquez’s first exhibit in the Philippines since 2008, and it shows paintings from different eras of her life from the 1980s in Manila to the present day in her residence in San Francisco. In all of them, her expressionistic style prevails as she explores the depiction of the household in the most interesting and abstract ways.
“Domestic interiors rendered in dynamic brushwork, bold colors, and innovative form wherein she explores the house as both a familiar place and an aspirational ideal will be exhibited alongside newly-made works of dense abstract scenes that, upon closer inspection, reveal figurative silhouettes–a man’s face, a child, a dog–among interiors and exteriors alike,” the exhibit write-up said.
Distorting Our Perceived Environment
The most interesting thing, for anyone seeing some of these works by Keka Enriquez for the first time, is how inscrutable she depicts her surroundings. If one were just skimming through her work, it would scan as a splatter-heavy work akin to Jackson Pollock.
But the abrasive brushstrokes, the dense layering of different colors, and the wild, intersecting shapes function really well as a depiction of a cluttered, active household. The figures and objects fit together like puzzle pieces, hidden in plain sight as they are buried by the jungles of lines and bright colors in the exhibit.
“Childhood and Weird Tales,” for example, feels like a mural-like depiction of various events happening all at once. “Gimme Shelter,” meanwhile, appears to contort buildings and trees together like a kaleidoscope. One can appreciate “Woman With Four Heads” as a strange combination of movie poster chic and neo-expressionist street art.
Many of these works were created as recently as 2024. As such, they feel fresh and varied, an explosion of life as time and space bend around the objects and the viewers. It renews our perspective of our environment and the way chaos can function as a balm of the familiar.
Calm Interiors, Layered Domesticity
Of course, the other paintings by Keka Enriquez acquire a calmer, less spirited depiction of the clutter of domesticity than the other works. “Pitcher Collection” and “Blue Kettle,” for example, shows its household objects with clarity, well-lit and positioned to allow us to take in all of the details of the work.
Others, like “Suppertime” or “Birdcage in a Chair,” bring in the distortion found in the other paintings, whilst maintaining the legibility of the objects and the room being shown. These are scenes of domesticity as seen from a funhouse mirror.
“However way it is grasped and rendered, the subject comes out vividly inhabited, even if it is sometimes styled to appear in a certain way, mediated as a commodity or an aspiration from a magazine, surely meant to entice,” the exhibit write-up said.
Keka Enriquez tends to set her work in the domestic sphere, a way for her to bring a level of social complexity to a sphere of influence not typically taken seriously by other artists. And with Points and Endings, there’s certainly some ideas at work here that collide our ideal views of the household with what’s real and familiar with our everyday lives.
“Here, paint no longer alludes to the object or objectifies the subject,” the write-up said. “It confuses the eye that expects a reconciled home and is finally led to the telling remains of an always eventful day, which may well speak of history, repressed or becoming.”
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: Santos Family Debuts New Collaborative Exhibit at Silverlens Manila
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