Modular Reconstruction

The Parts that (re)make the Whole
by Riel Jaramillo Hilario

Experts on the dynamics of seeing tell us that our visual intelligence is a growing network of associated images, remembered and interacting in the consciousness as an organic "body". Hence we see things as "wholes" instead of individual parts that lack connection. Visual perception leads us to make sense of disparate parts into bodies or phenomena. Scattered visual information tends to coagulate - not through a linear process of mechanical parts or computer codes - but rather as an organic growth, an overlapping, an aggregation of images and other information in the mind. In this manner, seeing is not only a simple translation of a visual sensation into a cognate that returns as a sign, a symbol or an icon in consciousness, but is rather a complex visual journey through layers and layers of associated images, ideas and other sensations. Thus we tend to experience the dynamics of perception with a tinge of nostalgia and pleasure.

Modular Reconstruction is an exhibition project by the FourArt group and works with the concepts associated with perception, of parts and wholes, of seeing and looking. It is a four part show in four separate galleries in Metro Manila, often involving distinct series of works for each venue. The artists of the project – Jes Evangelista, Norly Meimban, Raul Roco Jr. and Grandier Bella – explored and investigated the re-construction of elements from a selection of materials, painting modules, composition parts and even serial processes to form bodies of works that reflect the needs, demands and opportunities set by their original art projects and the exhibition space. In a sense, Modular Reconstruction is not just a four-part traveling show, but more of a growing, accumulative art project whose materials, concepts, and individual art pieces change, mature and diversify in the process between production and exhibition. It is an interesting project for it involves an intensified analysis of the artist's working process and identifies how one's work evolves over a brief period of time. While the final exhibit will be at the Boston Gallery, this is simply not the finale of a series of events, but rather as a conclusion to a project that involved the art spaces of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in Intramuros, Museo Pambata in Manila and the Ayala Museum in Makati City. Exhibiting in four venues demanded that the group adjust to the different kinds of viewers, the environment and the constraints of space. Modular Reconstruction is as complex as plunging into the nature of seeing, demanding a shifting of consciousness, a comparison between each show, each body of work, to arrive at a cogent understanding of the whole experience. No one can best attest to this experience however as the artists themselves, for they are assuredly the constant witnesses in the four-part stages.

As a collective the FourArt group is bound more by a common persuasion in artmaking and camaraderie, with each artist exploring an individual path on his own. For Modular Reconstruction, Jes Evangelista was drawn to negative shape patterns created by discarded wood toys and models. He explores the possibilities of the pattern both as image and as material, even working with both processes in one work. Norly Meimban re-creates the sense of gestalt and movement through works that offer partial views of elements in space and progressing in time. The artist adapts this principle from cell animation, where movement is conjured through an overlapping of visual elements displaced from a primary position. Grandier Bella explores the fragmented and disjointed worlds of urban life through shaped paintings on wood panel. Raul "Ponj" Roco Jr. meanwhile explores a series of small- to medium scale paintings that depict games, plays, and illusions of light with oils on canvas and wood and ceramic paint on industrial plastics.

Each of the four artists tackle perceptual problems: Evangelista with negative and incidental shapes, Meimban with partial vision and movement, Bella with fragmented images and Roco with illusions and visual games. Each presents solutions or elaborations that further explore the dynamics of seeing.

Evangelista's works takes us into a journey of discovery of unexpected directions and constructs of a surprising material. The artist discovered that negative shapes on discards from inexpensive three-dimensional wood puzzles and planar models displayed curious forms that presented sculptural and painting challenges. These models were available in flea markets and local tiangge stalls. The artist began collecting these discards, even re-constructing the models in his work in sculptural and installative configurations. But using these shapes in paintings and wallbound works remained Evangelista's main project. His various bricolage applications, often on canvas or wood panel presented the shapes as patterns, as positive forms on a toned or colored ground. The artist allows us to perceive unfamiliar or strange configurations from otherwise obscure materials and sources, coaxing from our perceptions previous visual experiences that accommodate the introduction of new shapes. This experience may leave us groping for familiar forms, even more familiar imagery and even convincing symbols that are dormant in our imagination.

Meimban for his project echoes the century-old attempt to covey motion and variation in a pictorial plane. For this end he uses the device of frame-by-frame cell animation, pictorial plane division and overlapping images in a flip book and translates these into modular paintings and installation pieces. The leitmotif in his "moving pictures" series is the figure of a Promethean man in a state of struggle with himself. He also incorporates images taken from digitalized pictures and photographs, dividing these into planes and inserting other pictorial elements in between. This approach not only distorts the original picture, but dislocates it, elongates it and conjures a movement in variation in situ. Displacement as a device in conjuring motion, change and diversity is Meimban's solution to his peculiar project.

Bella on the other hand explores the visual repercussions of working with a fragmented ground and thus achieving a metaphor apt for his images of urban life. Painted on shaped wood that has been cut and re-assembled into quasi-sculptural forms, Bella's work proceeds from a destruction of the rectangular pictorial frame that has been the canon for painting in many centuries. The shapes however, are more geometric still than organic, and retains the sense of mathematical borders, perimeters and grids. The artist then paints disjointed scenes of urban life on the broken-up surface, as a cracked mirror reflects various facets of its reflection. Still, our vision tries to re-integrate these broken planes into one, by cycling through the images as a series and returning with an organic understanding of their relatedness by comparisons of subject, color, image etc. The artist does not stray away needlessly and achieves a powerful coherence in his work.

Of the four, it is Roco who seems unfettered to a single line of exploration, and provides a variety of works in all four exhibitions. For the first three shows he uses the construction of a pictorial slide puzzle, interspersed with paintings on canvas and panel. For the fourth exhibit, Roco explores a series of illuminated paintings using loose drippings and brushwork of ceramic paint on industrial plexiglass. The painter also differs in respect to his forceful introduction of free play in his work often more than his peers in this show. Less technical and more spontaneous, Roco's work serves as counterpoint to the analytic paintings of Evangelista, Meimban and Bella. His illuminated paintings probe into effects produced by independently-illuminated works rather than the traditional reflected light which we experience in looking at paintings and other works of art. Roco's work also serves as installation elements that define spaces with their presence rather than visual content.

Modular Reconstruction takes us to varieties, phases, fields and sites of visual experience. Collectively, the works of the four artists are projected to be analytical exercises into the act of seeing, and also to the act of constructing, of making and of creating. However the projections and receptions differ in their results and their conclusions. What this project has offered the contemporary viewer are options and possibilities, even versions of a hitherto invariant experience afforded by easel painting exhibitions. For the artists, the project involves an opportunity for them to realize and draw insights from the process of a serial exhibition and art production process. The artists continuously produced pieces while the other shows went on, and this created a venue for incorporating viewer feedback into the production process, granting them more information for their next work. The artists are also given an opportunity to consider the scope and limitations of exhibitions in different sites, an experience that may well inform their practice.

What this project eventually leads to is something we have to ponder on and even wait for. At the moment Modular Reconstruction has served as an example of not only how vision is informed by an organic accumulation of diverse visual elements, nor only of how artworks are generated from disjointed materials and pictorial devices, but most importantly how staging an event of art, through exhibitions, are an accumulation of forces, accidents, intents and reactions. These finally form the visual experience that lies behind the curtain of artmaking and its presentation – a reconstruction of diverse experiences on multiple levels of understanding, interpretation and of course, seeing.