Opening on July 12 is Hard Edge and Blurred, an exhibit featuring the two artists' latest incursion into abstraction-figuration without digressing much from their familiar way of painting. Both artists however mine through the debris of familiar and historical icons, some bordering on the kitsch but having been ingrained in the daily routines of contemporary living that these images they've used posit personal attachment for them. Raquepo who's been isolating iconic elements from the canons of western art history and mixing them with various pop elements, mixes this infusion further by adding more pop imagery and making more apparent their lowly sources - from jeepney graphics to popular Pinoy motifs that usually populate the au courant type of "Philippine painting", e.g. the infamous posters of dogs gambling round a table, ice cream cart curlicues, wooden carved tourist souvenir implements found hanging in every kitchen, among others. The resulting paintings are a confusing mish mash of such elements but concentrated mostly on the center, flat planes of color reminiscent of MMDA institutionalized street decor frame these mix of motifs as some form of heraldry. What it may stand for however is a compressed history of artistic styles situating high and low in one providential schlock.

Referring to more than the formalist technique of applying paint on the canvas, which was how they referred to the likes of color-field painters, geometric abstractionists and to the other harbingers of the super-flattened plastic surface, Raquepo sees in how these art styles have become massively appropriated in graphic design and a whole lot of surface decoration, their hard-edginess losing ground, distinctions becoming more blurred in their incessant appropriation. If designing is a way of commandeering elements to a certain order or form, painting is not so different by such similar superficial goals.

Villaruel on the other hand, had been painting mostly from photographs, some taken by himself, others culled from a collection of fin-de-siecle adventurism in transport and aviation. The images, translated to his distinct way of painting, are almost always blurred at the edges, or some details at the background or foreground are interpreted as scumbled palettes of indiscernible vegetation or mossy ground. Perhaps, it's his way of imbibing as his own someone else's history, making indistinct the lines between collective and personal history, owning owed images by the artist's perception and interpretation of them.

In this exhibit however, Villaruel reverts to the basic structures of interiors - painting walls and edges of surfaces in his familiar manner of scumbling and glazing over contours of forms, as though softening demarcations between foreground and background, subject matter becoming defocused fields of color. In a literal interpretation of the theme, he elucidates the melting of forms as wavering signposts of memory and identity.

Hard-edge and Blurred will be on view until July 31.


(Mag:net is at 335 Agcor Building, Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City. The show opens at 6 pm on Saturday July 12 . For details or inquiries, contact the gallery at 929-31-91 or email magnetgalleries@gmail.com or visit www.magnetgalleries.com)