About the Event
Artery Art Space proudly presents "Hysteria" featuring works by Valeria Cavestany, Lara de los Reyes, and Maria Jeona Zoleta, that casts three propositions on painting by women who dismantle the conventional muscle of the medium with expressive aplomb, clever comebacks, and sexy bravado that put subjectivity back as something uniquely political.
Cavestany, de los Reyes, and Zoleta represent the cutting edge of Manila's painterly crop, all graduates of the University of the Philippines, and have shown locally and abroad that includes the Musée International des Arts Modeste (MIAM) in France, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, MOspace, Finale Art Gallery, Pablo Gallery, and 1335Mabini.
Valeria Cavestany's painting is a somnambulist catwalk in the realm of being and nothingness, a wild desire for life lustful of pleasure and enlightenment, a practice paradoxical in its promise of being both sinner and saint exposed in the vulnerability of its passions and humanity, dark and diabolical as diviner of mystical truths: painting as witches brew. Cavestany's practice can be traced back to Goya, where painting served as poetic conscience during turbulent times. Now, Cavestany's work pictures the divided self in the moment of global financial crises and religious terrorism, where creativity in the silence of its own sovereignty consoles the individual with dreams of freedom.
Lara de los Reyes' paintings screw about the control codes immanent in language, arranged haphazardly to avoid direct reading that lead to literal meanings, a logical outcome to painting's synchronic condition and complex layering: an abstract tryout for the emancipation of predetermined purposiveness, intent, or that bitch called beauty. They say that painting is just a bunch of styles handed down to you, so what happens when its returned backhanded, when the uncanny re-doubling occurs to appear ironically unique, original, born again to re-produce a work of art in the age of automated promiscuity - de los Reyes' works exploits this gender divide between intuitive femininity and the macho strutting of techniques to give old man painting an arousal, with an offspring that hardly resembles its forebears.
Over the top, brazen, vulgar, and loud are a few fast quips that don't give justice to Maria Jeona Zoleta's works involving images of shit, dicks, pussies, cum, and other bodily expenditures and scurrilous sexual escapades, all mixed with cute puppies and cats, school girls, delicious desserts, and various pop paraphernalia, which, altogether form an apocalyptic orgy of pleasure and pain, innocence and victimization, vulnerability and strength, heaven and hell, with an all-out war against laissez fair standards in painting.
Zoleta's works epitomizes bad painting as a contemporary conceptual stance on medium specific self-awareness and post-internet tactics, through the discombobulating visceral quality of the artist's gestural brushwork and all-over compositions amidst appropriations from random consumer culture.