Totems of Thought

Blanc Gallery | Group show | March 2022

Found chosen and incidental objects are often discovered to be ripe to reveal clues about how we move in our inner and outer spaces. History has shown us how both physical and intangible artifacts contain core memories that let us peer intimately into the past. Well-preserved grand monuments tend to be louder, but quiet, everyday relics—even the broken ones—contain as much context.

Totems of Thought is a glimpse into four artists’ evolution within their mental and physical surroundings. Four different styles explore subjects that were either chosen as a product of intent, or as a visual device used as a point of intention, meditation, imagination, and meaning-making and un-making.

Mark Nativo draws understanding of art from its deconstruction, stripping it back down to its essence. For him, that process lets one appreciate the parallel connections between the artist’s creative imagination and his unique reality. His subjects consist of humans poised to mingle with dream-like but familiar elements from nature, like nostalgic ruins pulled from a sepia dream. He stresses the natural connection between people and place, the visual symmetry and asymmetry in nature that surrounds us, the opposites found at both ends, and all the space between as parts of one whole.

Julius Bagoyo considers this set of works as an amalgamation of his previous forms of choice: portraits and statues. He incorporates both in the molten, portrait-style paintings spun off in previous works, along with some new elements not encountered previously in his process, such as botanical subjects. He shares that it also has some hint of religious nods, with some pieces inspired by Hinduism as a whole as well as Shiva—one of its deities.

Tad Pagaduan’s works are personal tributes to animals, as well as “the efforts that try to understand them, either through poetry or observatory”. Using them as points of rumination and understanding—of both animal and human nature, he dissects his own understanding and notion of how the similarities that tie us to them (birth, hunger, rage, joy, old age) are the very same things that point out how distinct our differences are (birth, hunger, rage, joy, old age), “and, sometimes with no actual reason to poke at—aside from staring at these beasts and saying ‘goddamn, will you look at that…’”.

Mark Angelo Turbolencia’s collage of textures and patterns show the motions of having traversed and escaped a rabbit hole of destructive habits such as addictive self-pleasure. His style is inspired by neoclassical paintings of his own choosing which were selected for their dynamic figurative subjects. He retains some of their postures in each reference, and adds his own texture such as tile-like motifs—reflecting his constant view in his bathroom, his self-designated safe space where he spends a lot of his time in for different reasons.

Notes by Nikki Ignacio