Pure Source.

It has almost been two decades since Louie Cordero and Jordin Isip first crossed paths through a number of exhibitions and projects. From these encounters, both have begun to form a conduit for artists between the cities of New York and Manila. Jordin Isip, an illustrator and educator based in Brooklyn, who has curated over a dozen shows that represent new directions in drawing and painting by young artists, might have found his counterpart in Louie Cordero, who is from Malabon, and who have over the years represented the more visceral brand of art coming from the city. Both have since then co-organized, and co-curated several group exhibitions that show the ties that bind the two cities. And this present iteration can be viewed as its continuation despite such trying times.

The two cities—and their city-dwellers—seem to have found a common ground through art, aside from the grit, grind, and their own respective entanglements with urban life, well-being, and daily politics. From each source comes one’s own nuanced vision. This is the meeting point—and a possible amalgamation (to which they once ascribed to as melted, in past exhibitions) where each artist seem to carry through their subject a fragment against the bigger narrative—and where the narrative consequently relates to how all fragments should lead on, stay, and remain in their purity. It is the essence of the melted city.

It is the idea of the counterpart that makes the fragmented remain in unison with the whole. And here, the motif that holds them together is the medium of paper. Consider Louie Cordero’s highly, grotesquely, evolved characters, done in acrylic against Jordin Isip’s somber re-evaluation of persona and ancestry. There is also the codified, incantatory diagrams and visions of Lourd de Veyra (Quezon City) against the cryptic, mentalscapes and symbols of Erika Shiba’s (New York) graphite drawings. Through an oddly innocent sensibility, both Ricky Torres (Manila) and Hazel Lee Santino’s (New York) works on paper seem to perform an aporia to the pitfalls of overthinking. And then there’s James Bascara (Brooklyn) and his ‘hallucinatory memories of home,’ responding to Astrid Terraza’s (Queens) manner of world-building, based on certain ‘personal and collective traumas.’

The whole exhibition itself could be seen as coming from opposing worlds, with links held precariously by genealogy, ancestry, and heritage. But the images, the works, and interpretations show such strong correspondence with each other that can be attributed to the uncompromising, exquisiteness, and daring through form, especially when invoked by the candor of paper.

The source opens up, and flows with elixirs for both longing and resistance, for dwelling and leaving, for remedies and conspiracies. The interaction of such contrived paths continues through art. This project, which is initiated by both Cordero and Isip, has served as an annual matter, and has become in its own right the convening and discovery of fragmented yet affiliated visions from both worlds. Visions that are procured from the streets, from dreams, from unrest, from histories, and from home—within and away, or standing at the edge of New York and Manila.

-CL