About the Event
Eight years after his last solo exhibition, Norberto Roldan returns to SILVERLENS with How can you jump over your shadow when you don’t have one anymore?, his first as a Silverlens represented artist and his second with the gallery.
How do we make sense of the autumnal period of an artist’s practice? What do we find in the “sabbatical” years that follow a career of deliberate reflections on situations and materiality that occupy their immediate domain? Norberto Roldan occupies a formidable space in regional and international circuits when it comes to representing material culture and contemporary art from the Philippines. This passage of critical recognition spans three decades of his lifework as an artist, curator, and community worker. When he is addressed as an artist, the reading of his works frequently relies on making meaning out of his images. Such a lens compacts his assemblages and paintings like an almanac of living through a post-colony, post-national set of circumstances. The permutations of his iconography have also been a preoccupation of other critics, writers and curators who register the artist’s order of things as conduit to the urgencies that an evolving practice must be confronting.
The exhibition How can you jump over your shadow when you don't have one anymore? gives a ring to cultivated lifework that marks its genesis thirty-plus years prior. The title is borrowed from Jean’s Baudrillard’s dedication in Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1991-1995 (published in 1997) that collects crystallized expositions of the notions of objects. This reference locates Roldan the reader, whose process in making art is largely prompted by the oblique directions that reading engenders. Rather than considering the transactional functions of such an activity to be appropriative at worst and heuristic at best, here we return to the nature of reading – circumlocutory and ambiguous, a fuel that essentially jogs the already discursive mind. Coincidentally, Roldan presents this exhibition at a similar period when Baudrillard wrote the texts that are gathered in the book Fragments.
What we encounter in Roldan’s solo exhibition are the composites of objects that come together through his practiced impulse as an artist known to write and rewrite the semantics of images. They reclaim meaning and substance in the way that he conflates the notions of lived and living pasts. While the texts in Baudrillard's books are in an intermediate point between notes and manuscript, the works in How can you jump over your shadow when you don't have one anymore? offer a deconstructive tactic. What we find in the exhibition is also our quotidian arranging of objects, images and memories. However, an artistic practice such as Roldan’s proposes that this tradition can be read beyond the materials that are put together and are initially demanded to exist as symbols of one’s subjectivities. The assemblages are not only documents. They offer us to think about artist as archive.
-Siddharta Perez