Unpublished notes number 2

Trek Valdizno – Divining The Spills of Thought

Recent Works
Arte’s Café, Quezon City
3 December 2005

How does one really approach abstract painting ? Is it almost always an act of instinct or is this rather learnt through incessant practice, as one learns it’s own vespers?

In seeming insouciance teemed with earnestness, malleable as its own material, it almost always prefigure the essence of the process itself, its own way of being and becoming in a given moment, greatly bespeaking of the wielder’s motives and thrust.

In Trek Valdizno’s works on paper exhibited at newly-opened Arte’s café located at South Triangle in Quezon City, these all flood through in globules with its last trace of sheen. Here are lines twisting, spiraling all over the paper, its viscosity weighing the plethora of patterns into relentless directions as the direct impressions of Valdizno’s pouring of multicolored acrylics thence zoning in on a specific part where he would create more swirls and strokes, at times with the tip of his brush. This produces crocheted networks of colored lines or fleeting echoes of familiar forms he would soon after doodle or spill over with another layer of paint, its marbling effect flowing to an image meltdown, particularities of recognizable forms maddeningly dissipated out of the whole picture. Funneling from the vantage of its discordant wholeness to the sum of its parts and back, he carries out this act of creation in seeming hermetic religiosity.

Accordingly, aspects of faith and the spiritual has tinctured his works since - from his allegorical installations, his sculptures of crosses made of metal discs and later to his paintings. Digressing from their edified connotations of sanctity, he rather conjures them as personal and conceptual iconographies – from his very practice to its produced form, distilling them to its most basic in grasping the essence of perfection as embodied in the spheres and spirals in most of his works. Moreover, in most mystic theosophies, it is the spiral which indeed exemplifies this as it’s correlated to the Source and to life’s unfolding mysteries in the cycle of evolution. While the sense of roundness as illustrated in concentric circles found in most mandalas portend to a centered grasping of the essence and alternately with the search for the ideal world model. This is further emphasized by recurrent motifs and symbols specially ordained by its maker. But as this struggle is unending, the cycle of this searching is infinite, its representation as ephemeral as its colored sand construct.

Quite similarly, how Valdizno titles each works reflects this mapping and navigating of his personal space-states seemingly divined in the celestial (‘Betelgeuse’); the elemental (‘Orinoco’); the organic (‘Laburnum’); the mingling state itself of paint (‘Amalgam’); or even to personifications of the id (‘Fountainhead’); moreover still to an invocation of his chosen solitariness (‘Anchorite’, ‘Medusa’); albeit their titular designations thriving mostly on their seeming likeness which remains illusory.

Though these paper works are randomly and spontaneously conceived, they’re nonetheless structured on the clock-work regularity of its making, belying hence the discipline involved in accomplishing these fleshed-out mental exercises which doesn’t seek the attendant magnificence of a labored composition but the inherent essence of the act of painting itself at the outburst of its own ideation. Its pure creation is it’s own vacillating perfection.