Thirty-seven year old Eric Guazon is an oracle.  His works tell that in his fourth solo exhibition entitled GRIDS OF FEAR which opens at the Hiraya Gallery on February 8, 2008.

Each of his canvases shows a nondescript human face, “a map where the protracted event takes place,” and the delineated genocide that is the lot of a segment of the human family.  His works do not portray a specific person for whom the hews and cries must arise from.  The human face was drawn from wherever his lambent interest in journalism had been switched on.  Guazon once intended to pursue a career in journalism.

Despite the fact that Guazon litters his canvases with images of soldiers in war game poses, his paintings have no reference to a particular news event, or any actual or historical event that transpired anywhere in the world.  Like the human face on his canvas, those images are a symbol of his constant theme: a plea for a peaceful and just order in the human society.

Guazon employs the images of the grid in order to give his theme a universal expanse.  “The trouble in paradise” is happening in many spots of the world.  Human right abuses, kidnappings, wars and rebellions, civil and religious strife, torture, guerilla warfare, military raids and insurgent attacks, terrorism, drug and trade wars, illegal arrests, enforced isolation of villages.  These disrupt peaceful living and produce pictures of pain over the irredeemable loss of human lives.

The grids and tiles symbolize the enclosing trap of human freedom, the curtailment to be suffered under despotism.  Like the process of photo transfer, the grid provides the linear plot to be followed by the artist so as to apply the photo within a space. In the same meaning, the grid expresses the symbolic depths of his emotions and advocacy for the theme of his works and exhibition.  His scatter of cut-out images and tiered spaces jump into the awareness of the viewer.

The disparity in the process of creating the elements of his works, i.e., drawing the map of the human face and the carving of his motifs or vignettes into the grids describes Guazon as an oracle.  He is not a militant artist of social realism.  Nor does he intend to stir the feeling of anger against the establishment or the status quo.  An artist should not be a militant,” he says. “But he should be subversive to the current order so that change can come about.”

Guazon is a moderate, a pacifist.  In his works, he illustrates the chaos and the pain which follow if the grids of fear overrun the society and his brethren.