by Rod. Paras-Perez

The Phillipine Daily Inquirer, June 21, 1999

Valeria Cavestany, well known for floral paintings scented with the peculiar aura of dream and reality, of textured whimsy and sensible textile patterns, suddenly leaps from painting for pleasure to painting the excitement with ideas.  Aptly enough, the form taken for this exploration of ideas is the Installation, a first venture for both The Drawing Room and the artist.

     An Installation is, of course, open to a lot of possibilities.  This is why it is such a favorite form among artists impatient with traditional media.  Moreover, the crucial distinction between painting per se and installation lies in the way each is experienced: painting is viewed with a certain degree of detachment, what is sometimes referred to as aesthetic distance, while an installation piece entails actually physically moving into and out of the physical space of the artwork--the experience, more direct and real.

     The support or paper used for the painting-scrolls is obsolete computer printing paper.  This is indeed worthy of a degree of excitement but lest we forget, ancient Picasso and Duchamp were not strangers to recycling either--Picasso with his bicycle handle cum goat, and Duchamp with his hardly altered urinal: from utilitarian object to art object.

     Obviously, the excitement in this case comes not from any sense of originality but from a more or less personal discovery of finding a more contemporary material to embody the idea of recycling.

     And the audience?  Perhaps, sharing in the updating of the term recycling.  The scroll-like handling of the material is conventional enough although paper lengths were presumably adjusted to correspond with haiku structures.  This means, site specific allusions to China and Japan.  There are, of course, quite a number of specifically Chinese images.  Thus, structurally and thematically, there is a sort of convergence.

     An installation is thus both art object plus performance.  Valeria's Drawing Room exhibition is moreover installation cum scroll-like paintings o paper cum collage cum little theater.  Even the imagery works in layers:  there are distant heroes--from Rizal to Bonifacio to Del Pilar et al vis-a-vis the more personal layers of admired and not so admirable personages; and, at the back, colorful, guidonlike collages--certainly abstract, in stark contrast to the whimsically painted heroes and less-than-heroic personalities.

Tension

     Certainly, there is a tension between the generalizing level of the heroes and the particularizing circle of the artist's friends.  This is equally apparent in the title: "Kula, kula, kulay."  The repetition of words is essentially an Asia-Pacific occurrence, vide:  gapgap (Polynesian: arrow root), karya-karya (Malaysian: artworks), etc.

     Kulay, although in Filipino entails a general idea.  The point is:  is this conceived or arrived at?

     Presumably, there are other sources of excitement for the artist:  the idea of recycling for instance.

Scrolls

     There is moreover another element introduced:  the scroll-like images are often fragmented through the simple means of separated scrolls.  The images thus attain a duality that move between realism and abstraction, or if you wish, between pure design and iconic references.  This somehow bridges the distance between the guidonlike collages at the back and the more imagistic scrolls; but his is stiall a sort of a bridge too far.

     Alas this device is not new either!  A number of pop artists did it before.  Perhaps what gives it a sense of newness is the artist's self-discovery.  If fresh and convincing enough--the audience shares the experience as a sort of renewal.

     The postmodern sensibility definitely rides rather heavily on pop art.  More so in the use of images taken from ordinary things.  Valeria's thought processes actually took this in stride, including the current critical idioms, thus:  "I wanted... to have a postmodern lightness of touch literally and figuratively... the paper if framed would loose its lightness and impact as computer printing paper, the whole experiment... with multi-layered meanings... why not hang them literally with wooden pegs... I wanted to be decentered, irreverent and self-aware.

     This self-awareness premise is actually the extension of the expression paradigm except that present fashion goes for the casual, light touch in lieu of the Romantic breast thumping and touch of madness.

Cutting-edge Art

     A lot of presumably cutting-edge art now thus becomes esoteric biographic images--vice:  Beuys fondness for felt and grease.

     In the case of Valeria--the admonition:   Don't ventilate your dirty laundry in public led her to "the idea of opposites... the display of clean laundry and therefore I decided to paint my family, my friends, peoples close to me or who had influence in some way my life... very autobiographical and yet private in choosing who to include or not.."

     Perhaps the impulse to include everything, the idea of layering of meanings may be attributed to all new attempts. Thus, the initial problem involved will be one of focus. But what happens if the viewpoint carries a cultural frameworks, a sort of cultural programming? A look at a few novels from the Hispano-Iberian cultural basin will indicate more than a predisposition to such a layering of meanings and images, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez works, or those of Carlos Fuentes, or even Laura Esquivel or the Portuguese Antonio Lobo Antunes, none of them Spanish but deeply touched by the Hispanic sensibility. Valeria is Spanish, ah yes-she will probably protest-Catalan.

     Perhaps, eventually, the answers will be clearer, the focus more sharp.  Meanwhile, enjoy the show. It is an art exhibit, theatrical entertainment and provocation. Have fun!