Unpublished notes number 3

A Ballad Of Arbitrary Methods
Maria Taniguchi
Theo Gallery, Café Saguijo, 7612 Guijo St. San Antonio Village Makati
24 January – 22 February 2006

What does history teach us? It seems an imperative that we learn a progressive narration of what we’ve become or what we may become. Or we just feel the pressure of time being compacted into a moment. In art, we do as we’re told and try to get something out of it, eventually originality becomes a bonus for all such effort. Even rather it becomes a long debacle to a sought after understanding which is as elusive as air or the last strains of a song looped into our psyche. And Maria Taniguchi bears that epic toil in her latest exhibit entitled A Ballad Of Arbitrary Methods.

Arbitrary is used as it were with the different ways certain forms were drawn, reconfigured, executed on a variety of surface – canvas, board, paper – following the precepts of her methods producing at once messy, layered, thick paintings and finely drafted constructions of structures. But these are all casually hung, tacked directly on the wall as though you’re given a preview of her studio.

Though formally trained as a sculptor, Taniguchi finds in painting a special tactility that has become lost in actual ‘objects’. Further she says that they (paintings and drawings) are more dynamic and open to a lot of possibilities, aside from possessing a certain smoothness or rather fluidity as opposed to the very determinate form of a ‘sculpted’ or made object. Her series of ‘ Drawings from The Anthology of Future Projects’ attests to their ‘deadness’ as they are matted and framed in a hexagonal shape reminiscent of a coffin. A lot of them were once installed in Vargas Museum in a past show The Sedimentation of the Mind Is A Jumbled Museum like grave markers littering the marbled floor. But who knows if they will ever be fleshed out, yet here they are as drawings, taking actual space and being viewed in real time. Their execution in 3D might even render them as redundant. Same here with the tacked canvases, all brazenly showing their unraveling seams and rough edges. Their very immediacy belie as well the subconscious ruminations of Taniguchi’s mind - missives of dejection, back-of-notebooks doodles of decapitated parts and still life vignettes are graffittoed all over as seen in the works ‘Oh Samson’ and ‘Futur Skunk’. Recurrent forms build-up as she paints along the way, something akin to a stream-of-consciousness note taking where the brain, the knotted ropes, the volcanoes, the mountain ranges, the cut-off hands, the isosceles peak appear repeatedly as though symptomatizing an inexplicable obsession for such. Or they may even be emblematic insignias to a formula she is trying to devise in weighing out much inured art history, moreso when that history and all its specific movements are prone to much stylization. But Taniguchi is quite conflicted with such generalization that she either accepts them and paints in ‘these art historic styles’ or conflates them all by producing one of her own.


This may be summed up in one of her works Prolonging The Exit where on a deadened green field a prism-like elongation is diagonally placed, one end is that of a complete brick house while the other end is an unfinished brick wall. The middle part of this form doesn’t give much clue as to where the completion of the house begins or where the unfinished wall has taken off its first layer of bricks. It’s also very much like so as that of Doppelganger where a modestly-sized pair of oil paintings of a Mabini-esque bay scenery of palm trees, nipa hut, and mountain ranges painted in thick black, gray and white are placed side by side, she somehow evokes this swing shifts in principle . Though she tries to be faithful in creating two very similar works, they don’t come out as exact copies. Both these works propositions a neither here nor there position