Threads

Dino Gabito

The Ghost of Gauze

In much of his artistic career, Dino Gabito has painted works of shrouded figures in monochrome, a sustained investigation that has led him to explore the space—and the underlying tension—between privacy and revelation, between the observing eye and thing observed. His body of work may be called anti-portraiture for its refusal to convey not merely identifying physical features but emotional and psychological states, which may offer an antidote to the age of selfies and oversharing.

For his latest exhibition, Threads, Gabito temporarily disrupts his consistent thematic preoccupation, but not in its entirety. Through a suite of works on paper, the audience encounters cloth, this time not as a medium of concealment but its own malleable and evocative material, revealing the structural weft and woof, the areas of folds and creases, and the overall silhouette in space. The diaphanous quality of the image approaches abstraction, mutating depending upon how the viewer’s slant of eye perceives it: an errant cloud, a gust of wind made visible, an outline of a ferocious animal.

In the absence of associations, the forms convey the fluidity, softness, and semi-transparency of the material, the gauze that Gabito has used. Through a process similar to relief printmaking, the artist would dip the cloth into his choice of color and apply the soaked gauze on paper, making and leaving behind an imprint. Generally, the works are two-toned: a colored silhouette is dominated by a grayish black mesh, locked in a marvelous counterpoint. The cloth that Gabito so meticulously rendered in his paintings achieves a pared-down honesty in these works as it is a direct translation of an actual physical object: the subject thoroughly knitted into its matter.

To Gabito, it is more than the materiality of the cloth that is underscored. It is linked to a childhood memory, recalling the cloth diapers that the artist’s mother sold at one point. Before sending them off to families giddy with a newborn, Gabito’s mother would embroider the name of the child onto the cloth and hem-stitch it so the edges won’t unravel. The subtly colored patterns in the works recall the baby blues and sunny yellows of the threads that the artist’s mother used to personalize the diapers. What appears as abstract is essentially rooted in autobiography.

Threads offers a connecting line to Gabito’s notable series, not only because of the use of cloth as subject matter, but of the artist’s sleight-of-hand in conveying that something always lurks beneath the layers. In the case of these works, however, the artist has prioritized transparency over opacity, space over volume, a soaked cloth over a loaded brush. By so doing, the artist’s approach has become one of improvisation, which involves trust in the printing technique and the material’s own revelations. Yes, the resulting image is the ghostly impression of the gauze, but it’s also time’s imprint that has brought together medium and memory, cloth and concept, ink and intention.

-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana