Allan Balisi’s Art of Echoes and Connections

For Allan Balisi, art is an instrument to combat despair, a gesture to make sense of solidarity in a meaningful way. Born in Isabela, the artist graduated from Far Eastern University’s Fine Arts program in 2005. He was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards in 2009 and 2013. He has had group and solo exhibitions in major contemporary art galleries, here and overseas. He has recently been awarded the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award for this year.

Allan Balisi returns to Blanc Gallery with this unmissable solo exhibition titled “To Our Friends.” He says, “This show is about connections, about echoes.” He presents seventeen stunning works that echo ongoing quiet conversations that make the connections between resisting and thriving. He uses this works as a vehicle to impart a specific message and pursues ways people connect through movements. These are usually responses based on some pre-existing idea and the barriers to public transformation. 

One of the more notable pieces in this exhibit is the work that greets you upon entering the gallery. “The Urgency of Making Kin” shows Donna Haraway and Jose Lacaba, depicting a group captured in a festive pantomime. 

In “Seek no adherent, but accomplices,” the intersection between love and anger is represented as two non-mutually exclusive reasons for gathering together. It is an example of a piece that reignites the feeling of collective power, a reminder of the power of everyday acts of resistance, and how these small acts can be radical in that they move people onward.

All the engaging works capture the figures in the middle of moving. The man in “Epoch” shows that moment when one decides to move, which is the beginning of everything. Another stunning work, “Enact,” depicts an actress in the middle of a performance on stage. Even the flower painted in “Reminder” is preserved in a particular state, halted in motion.

“Paved With Good Intentions,” which shows a burning vehicle is in view of an open gate which implies the presence of a spectator. This image was after a press photograph in 1972, signaling the beginning of Martial Law in the Philippines. The work represents people’s despair and desire and uncompromising rejection of the prevailing order, which opens up imagining another reality. The artist says that in wreckage and destruction, there is hope. 

What can be considered the most significant piece in the exhibit, “The Self-enclosed Individual, is Fiction,” may remind the audience of the image of Saint Sebastian, shot with arrows.

Allan Balisi continues to frame a visual narrative of mystery and gets his audience’s attention through the ambivalence and curiosity of the images he captures in his works.

As Carina Santos stated on the show’s notes, “Ultimately, To Our Friends leans heavily on the idea of brokenness being an opening for something better, of positive growth in a site of loss. Through his chosen medium of communication, Balisi examines the role of painting — as gesture, as a space, as a tactic — in engaging with and affirming contemporary currents of thought, drawn from acknowledging the historical violences.”

“To Our Friends” is on view until Novermber 6, 2021 at Blanc Gallery, 145 Katipunan Avenue, QC.

Notes about the Contributor

Daniel Lampa

Art enthusiast and into Fashion, French Culture, Mid-century modern design and spends a lot of his time curating his home in Manila and LA. He lives with his 3 dogs, Coco, Yohji and Junya.