Unpublished notes number 4

Paint it Black
Group Show – Argee Bandoy, Louie Cordero, Bembol dela Cruz, Jayson Oliveria, Gary
Ross Pastrana, Wire Tuazon, Chris Villanueva, MM Yu
10 February 2006
West Gallery, West Avenue, QC
Curated by Nilo Ilarde

The square is presupposed to be the sign post of modernism. Malevich has laid down such keystone with his painting of a black square on a white ground. It was to be the absolute statement of objectivity. Though, his primary audience was hapless to see a desert, bereft of comforting and familiar sights, lost in such vacuity, its blackness, “like a hole sucking up light absorbing the capacity for description”. They are however unaware that they’re being lead to the plastic space where art is purely experienced. Embodying this total experience is a form of perfect conditions. For a square is symmetry, balance, favoring no side a circle can circumscribe its four corners; it preserves its dimensions however diminished, yet it encompasses plenitude in its divisibility. By this measure, it was now possible for painting to be seen as surface, a thing in itself, beyond mere device to window pictorialism, to see painting go forth from subject to object and back, moreover, a material of space which it occupies.

The exhibit Paint It Black verily exemplifies this presupposition in placing the paintings in actual space as they’re made to stand on the floor instead of being hung on the wall. Uniformly sized as 6’ x 6’, these paintings by Argee Bandoy, Louie Cordero, Bembol dela Cruz, Jayson Oliveria, Gary Ross Pastrana, Wire Tuazon, Chris Villanueva and MM Yu are so arranged as to re-construct Tony Smith’s seminal piece Die, an ominously hollow black steel cube whose carefully considered proportions were based on Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man. This oft referred diagram aimed for a universal ideal that is very anthropocentric and with which architecture similarly drafts its plans. However, in being specific in its dimension (likewise sized as 6 cu ft), Die defies the usual apportioned scales of monuments and pedestal objects, but instead invites direct confrontation. The paintings in the show likewise operate in being neither easel paintings nor murals, more like structures even, seemingly drawing parallels with the space of exhibition.

For whatever meaning Smith may allude to for Die, these meanings however cut through three levels : as to refer to the process of its making (die cast), to the systematic but random operation of natural models commonly associated with most minimalist works (die/dice), and to the subjective signification of its being black (die/ death). Black may come to mean then as the inevitable end, a consummation, the summation, the loss of visible light, a vacuum, the color of eclipse, hollow and full, whole and deep, space and surface.

But as the exhibit title seems to invoke, Paint It Black demands these paintings on exhibit to succumb to gravity, to be matter itself, to be paint itself, to be the very means of its own course, to be the very negation of its own command. For as Paul Klee have said : “We do not have to understand black, it is the primeval ground.” Thus, it is indeed the absolute which painting continually attempts to set asunder.