Recently, four contemporary artists bared their souls in a concluded exhibit held in the heart of Makati. Four women artists shared their unique inner thoughts and emotions culled from their respective circumstances amidst the challenges brought by current pandemic. Four different voices stood out in unison to expose their being. Four disciples of the visual art boldly showed four different strokes in an interpretation of Dead Layer in a single show.
“Dead layer refers to a layer of paint after an underpainting, characterized by its gray, achromatic tones. At this stage, an artist doesn’t concern himself yet with capturing the color of the subject. The main concern is to establish the correct value of the darkness and lightness, and the full spectrum of grays in between. Figuratively, dead layer may be illustrated as what is true in our eyes, in terms of how light or dark reality is,” said Robert Besana, the exhibit curator and executive director of the Asia Pacific College’s School of Multimedia and Arts.
For Besana, Dead Layer is “a group show that aims to showcase works from four promising contemporary female artists, in reference to the exhibit’s premise. The curatorial challenge to the artists is for them to react on these two concepts, how deep they need to harrow until they arrived on what dead layer is for them.”
As progressive thinkers, Besana believes that “they represent their generation well, the topics/concerns they discuss. Primarily what’s common to these artists is their use of monochrome tone in their works.
In my current practice in art, I’m interested in rediscovering the classical methods of painting. Employing of the dead layer is certainly unique in classical art. We used and explored this technique as our key theme in this exhibit.”
Dead layer exposed
In March, Quezon City resident Jan Sunday was caught in a lockdown in Cebu while visiting her parents. Despite having no access to her art materials and her trusted camera, Sunday heeded the call to create wherever she may be, just like a true artist from two previous shows. Fixating on the texture and patterns from the cemented floor, Sunday began to conceptualize her pieces while on laundry duty. Fascinated by the layering of grime, soot, paint and dirt on cemented pavements, dead layer for her came in concrete and abstract nature while utilizing watercolor, spray paint, oil pastel and graphite pencil. She also added scans of raw meat and infused them using an inkjet photocopier to complete her The Void Becomes series.
From her solo exhibition last year, Anne Concepcion continues to manifest her maternal love for children, may they be her own, or not. A tattoo artist by profession, she is meticulous to details and is quite comfortable creating images using ballpoint pens, even in a challenging dead layer technique. In Balakid, Concepcion raises her skepticism over her own daughter’s world under the community quarantine. Inside her home, she finds her daughter somehow easing her loneliness through gadgets and technology. In another work called Paghihinagpis, Concepcion drew a weeping child’s face burdened with trauma and worries, a scene drawn from the recent bombing incident in Beirut.
Art also has been the coping mechanism of Ivy Floresca as she dealt with life in a pandemic. Inducing a meditative state to her being, she escapes into her own world in a spiritual realm. Recently, her acrylic creations have given way to her expressions of cyberpunk.
Known for the use of pen and ink, Katarina Estrada processes her pain and translates them on Korean Hanji paper. In the recent Art Fair, Estrada unveiled nudes, as part of her healing process as she dealt with past traumas and toxic relationships. For Estrada, dead layer comes in figurative forms of erotica, where warm bodies turn cold and mortal.
Layers of relevance
Not a just an exhibition of the mastery of their skills, this quartet is also making a mark for themselves, as women artists, through Dead Layer.
“I’m proud that I was able to put them together in one show because these are thinking artists. It’s important for curators to be proud of what they hang on the walls of the gallery. When you see these like-minded women artists work together they create a more solid statement, in effect, makes them to be more relevant in the contemporary art scene,” concluded Besana.
The Dead Layer exhibit was staged from November 27 to December 11 at the White Walls Gallery in Makati City.
Image credits: Robert Besana