Jack of Golds
Blanc Gallery
July 2020
Jack of Golds is dealt to you, as it were, as a group exhibition, although to have perceived first that it is a singular artist’s call to action—where Wipo plays quasi-collaborator and quasi-curator—may grant a leverage in speculating on this gathering of artists’ covert impetus, one that is arguably unknown even to the intimate party in question, as here, gold is both flame and fuel, body and soul, muse and mystery.
This transitory artist-network is a thinking-out-loud with an incidentally shiny physicality, constituting a trove-staging that is unabashedly unfinal, an amber-tinged conversation that skirts the thin line between pure and puerile, all the while disavowing the pains of passing judgment on which is which; imagine that the miner is blind to the blinding: the exactitude of the determination of karat units is bumped off for the democracy of a census. The artist is primarily interested to know: What is gold to you? It is a deceptively plain probe into the cavernous cosmogony of inner lives and private thought, but it is also a question that seeps into the intricacies of moral valuation, inevitably extending onto the gray domain of the ideological and political. The elemental impetus here is as democratic as it is psychoanalytic.
Is answering the riddle of the Sphinx itself a voluntary act of self-incrimination, a Faustian pact? In this case, the golden bargain is love-at-first-sight in exchange for what is itself a beast, a mammoth paradox of what is apparent and what is hidden, and the irony of what is hidden in plain sight. Perhaps the hidden project here is an anti-alchemy, the turning of gold into what is other-than-gold. The pertinent transmutation here is not of metallurgy, but of meaning.
Although briefly united in this setting, the artists find themselves ultimately stumbling on forking paths: among them, the transactional diminution of identity, synecdochic mirrors to memory, introspections on touch and time, and doubts cast on the truth in beauty. — JED GREGORIO
Works
CELINE LEE - UNTITLED
GLENN MENDIOLA - UNTITLED 1
GLENN MENDIOLA - UNTITLED 2
GLENN MENDIOLA - UNTITLED 3
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 4
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 5
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 6
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 7
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 8
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 9
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 10
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 11
ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - BUSINESS OF LOSING TOUCH 12
JEROME LORICO - DANIEL 5:27 (WEIGHTED BUT FOUND WANTING)
KAT GROW - NECTAR OF BECOMING
KOKI LXX - FIVE UNEASY PIECES
LESYLEY-ANNE CAO
LILIANNA MANAHAN - UNTITLED
MARCO ROSARIO - FROM WOOD ASHES
MARS BUGAOAN - 10.03.2020
MIGUEL LORENZO UY - ABSTRACTIONS (EMV)
MIGUEL PUYAT - GOLDEN HOUR
PURPO - GOLDEN SUNSET
RAFAELLE LOUISE - UNTITLED (GOLD LANDSCAPE)
RAFAELLE LOUISE - WINGED SUN
RICHARD LEGASPI - ILLUSIONE
RICHARD LEGASPI - MISTERO
RICHARD LEGASPI - VERITA
SPEKTACULARIS - AURELIA 1
SPEKTACULARIS - AURELIA 2
WIPO - GOLD IS GOOD
WIPO - DELAYED RENDITION
WIPO - BRUSH,30
WIPO - GOLD EYES
WIPO - GOLD ON GOD
WIPO - GOLD ON NUTS
WIPO & ISSAY RODRIGUEZ - GOLD STICKERS
WIPO - GOLD ON PALM
WIPO - UNTITLED
WIPO - BLACK CANVAS 1
Documentation
