Looking with Others

This exhibition brings together the work of Rolf Campos and Taj Hassan Tadeo, artists whose practices are entwined by people and place. Residing in adjacent towns in Zambales, Rolf and Taj met through their mentor, Don Salubayba, who was then actively working with Casa San Miguel, a community arts center in San Antonio.

When Don passed in 2014, Rolf and Taj pursued divergent interests, raised families, and moved to other cities. Rolf considers their distinct but overlapping worlds as the ground from which this exhibition is cultivated, marking their “transition from the place where we used to be, to the place where we are going.”

Taj echoes this idea through a new series of works that focuses on looking as a kind of “collective experience… shaped by memory, history, and relationships with others.” In his work, this is expressed compositionally through mirroring, a device that duplicates while underlining symmetry – an inward and outward movement requiring both personal and interpersonal processes of sensing the self. Erasure, however, disrupts this flow and suggests the wearing of time as a key intervention in this chain of interactions. Layered with mirrored texts that ask viewers to decode between image and letters, causal relationships are blurred between what happened —the artist’s childhood photographs damaged by the Pinatubo eruption— and what is comprehensible or changeable. For the artist, the creation of a double vision attempts to open up more than one way of seeing or remembering. These superimpositions signal an archive that drifts: openly vulnerable and wrought by time.

On the other hand, time plays a significant role in Rolf’s work, not as rupture, but as that which significantly shapes the life of an idea. The artist first used what he calls “elements of ecology” in 2014 during his first solo exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. In this first series he drew tiny endemic birds alongside dried plants pressed onto canvas paper, fusing flora and fauna into one plane, dissolving categories of taxonomy and representation. Rolf’s employment as a botanical/scientific illustrator for the National Museum of Natural History further enabled his visual research into the morphology of organisms. He has since probed into a universe of plant forms, painting natural life through various adventures in visual language and temperament. For this work, twelve years since his first plant series, Rolf stays close to his favorite preoccupation while asking, gleefully, how can one color create an atmosphere of forms?

Neighbors once again, Rolf and Taj speak to one another, exchange ideas, and move across locations and inclinations. This exhibition, rooted in friendship, brings forth a shared interest in looking and becoming, and shares this too with others who may wish to do the same.

* Note: Rolf and Taj first showed their work together in 2012 at Casa San Miguel in Zambales for the exhibition Prusisyon. Don Salubayba was the curator and organizer.

– PSA