A NEW show by Patricia Perez Eustaquio at Silverlens Galleries is a melange of soft fabric sculptures and drawings on paper where the artist continues to dissect the binary oppositions found in the process of translation from one form to another.
For this series, the artist takes portions from her digital loom tapestries and renders them in graphite as archipelagic fragments seemingly adrift and jagged on taupe, salmon and gray paper.
The use of colored paper and the compressed quality in the drawings are marked changes from her previous work where pig’s flesh, wilted flowers, or studio scraps were traced in sprawling and languid detail as if landscapes on the loose. The neutral color as background also blurs the smushed and in some parts blank strokes in the drawings, as if subtracting the weight from the original inspiration of the tapestries translated from the works of canonical Filipino painters—heavy with the burden of cultural inheritance and tethered by the gravity of present-day context—into something as perishable, light and inconsequential as paper.
The same nimbleness can be seen in the soft sculptures of palm plants made of wire, stuffing, tapestry, textile, and microfiber bits like gills on a fish.
They surprisingly look complicated with deep intention, yet are ornamental and cuddly at the same time—oscillating tendencies that lend well to facing the harsh realities of life indirectly without refusing to live with it.
Patricia Perez Eustaquio has worked in a variety of mediums and disciplines from craft to paintings. Her works are on view at the Silverlens Galleries in Makati City until June 18.