Limbo | Don Bryan Bunag

Every once in a while, art inhabits a room as a pure and exhaustive meditation on space. Such is Don Bryan Bunag’s Limbo, with its inclinations to world-building, invites its viewers to traverse a series of settings. Land, sea, sky, and the portions that form in between — it is no doubt a survey on a mysterious place and presence. Limbo, as a state of presence, of being there. But it is the ‘being there amidst not knowing’ of where, or when, exactly.

Blackness, the void, the apprehensions and hesitations of time, are all manifested through the formation of monoliths. These monoliths act as the central figure in Bunag’s works. For all their representations within the fabric of visual narratives — in literature, films, and even in speculative archeologies, they embody the mysteries of origin and the divine, and more necessarily, the reverence of the unknown.

What makes Bunag’s monoliths doubly interesting is the integration of a relatively external element across the painted world of landscapes and seascapes. Cotton threads occupy these worlds as if part and parcel of the view, as if diegetic occurrences that are borne out of the scene. Stitched into the canvas, they have become lines that define the compositions, incidental yet embedded. Blended yet invasive.

‘The string, essentially, is a basic materialization of a line,’ asserts Bunag. These threads, when stretched in full tension, demonstrate a kind of ‘ready-made’ object for drawing and composition. These lines then become an integral part of the narrative, directing our eyes to the presence and ambiguity of monoliths, presenting them with activity, connecting them across their vague environs, assigning to them either movement or anchor.

Bunag traces the affinity with threads from his childhood while seeing his grandmother, a dressmaker, working while growing up. Can these monoliths account for such an endearing experience? As the sum of several parts, Limbo occupies the many spaces of memory, mystery; of the imagined and the real.

The first series where the monoliths appear are part of a nameless, numbered progression of an encompassing project. Bunag has accumulated these pieces throughout, envisioning them as an ongoing exploration of the subject. Alluding to them as ‘internal landscapes,’ they continue to imagine the places that generate an inherent mystery, seeking revelations and connections.

‘In-between Nows,’ the misaligned diptych, provides another kind of structure to the idea of limbo—where the void becomes the common circumstance where two, incongruent worlds intersect. In ‘Trance,’ the multi-dimensionality of it all becomes apparent.

Aside from all the ruminations about space, Bunag’s Limbo endeavors a unique take on the centrality about subject matter which seems to assert: at the center, there is only nothing. The imposing figure, whether through shadows or floating fragments, is still nothing but a slab of negative space. We are challenged to look, to consider, and to find the meaning against this mystery, shrouded in blackness. We are obliged to stare at nothing. And nothingness continues to hold the weight of all the worlds in Limbo that are interconnected.

/CLJ