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HIRAYA GALLERY marks another milestone on October 17, 2006 with a group exhibition entitled ‘FEEL NO PAIN”, a participation of twelve visual artists in the mediums of painting, digital art and photography.
The exhibition is the anniversary celebration of its 26th year as a leading art venue which introduced new and exciting talents in the Philippine art scene from 1980 up to the present. An incidental role in the art trade, the discovery of fresh and unknown talents evolved as a firebrand of Hiraya Gallery among foreign art buyers and local aficionados.
The artists to be featured in “Feel No Pain” belong to diverse ages and come from different art stimuli. Fifty-seven year old Deborah del Pan knew that she has the soul of a painter but began to learn only 10 years ago. Golden-aged Bobot Meru is a lifestyle photographer of a glossy magazine and yet aims his personal eye at the marginal lives in the squatter areas of the big city. All somewhere in their 30’s Ronald Ventura, Eric Guazon, Thomas Daquioag, Arnel Brillantes and Karla Cruz-Gobin have tried their mettle on the medium of oil and acrylic.
A teacher of art at the European International School in Parañaque, Metro Manila, Karla Cruz-Gobin shows off the form called the Belgian surreal art that she has mastered at the Cours des Metiers d’Arts du Hainaut in Belgium. Her 12 small frames to be displayed at the Inner Room of Hiraya Gallery during the exhibition are extremely personal pieces of works which she describes collectively as “musings in repose.” They are aesthetic explorations on a style described as social realism and neo-realism. Admittedly expressions of the personal sense of her being, Karla paints a poignant and gripping portrayal of melancholia under the safety measures of habitat and traditional mores.
Her subject is PAIN, as do all of the other artists’ works. A universal word which spins on the emotional images of death, a loss of being loved, to become luckless, being an orphan or the abused, the last laughter,---pain winds in the physical, emotional and psychological experience. Great literature and songs showed that pain has been the watershed of inspirations.
Eric Guazon approximates in “Collateral #2” a melodramatic depiction of the carnal violence which comfort women experienced in World War II. Silence in shame that seethes inside the human mind and memory wears a kindly expression on his model’s face.
Full-time painter Arnel Brillantes documents in impressionist style his father’s departure from the Philippines. “Paglisan” speaks of the ripples of feelings that occur inside a young son who shared 32 years of a lifetime with a hero who must leave a homeland for a better health care abroad. A Filipino family drifts apart as waves do from the center of the ocean.
Thomas Daquioag paints a paean to an extraordinary Filipina matriarch, Mrs Pilar Goyena, who holds a century of birth anniversaries in November 2006. She saw history happen with the country’s political leaders, graced the fine line of the upper crust of society as an equestrienne, and subverts the same crust by becoming a pugilist under famous boxer Pancho Villa. Daquioag is drawn towards the narratives of his subjects’ lives in his portraits.
Deborah Del Pan’s “Madonna Without” filters the strains of pain thickly in the breeze flowing into the old flesh and bones of a woman that lets out memory and imagination to weave a ghostly image of a kind stranger on the mirror.
Egyptian painter Amani Abdelbari Pourcines embellishes her portrait of Mrs. Goyena with tenderness and understanding that can only come from a sharer. The bowed face wears a gripping expression of reticence before the withering affection for life which moves away slowly. This expansive motion is voiced in the motifs of bright colored human nerve forms. “Isolation and Connection” is a sample of Amani’s fascination in human faces, a habit formed from her art classes in Corcoran College of Art, Washington D.C. and at Penninguen and Les Beaux Arts de Versailles.
On the same breadth as Daquiaog’s portrait of Mrs. Goyena, magazine photographer Bobot Meru captured a sharp camera the bravura spirit of the squatter neighbors. Toothless that mark the wearisome turn-overs of life’s events and spirits already settled from the restlessness of their youth mark their unheard guffaws.
A recent recipient of the 2006 Ateneo Art Award Maya Muñoz records in “Shikataganai Mon Amour” a sharp trick of memory which lie in street graffiti and ultimately inside the human fate. “All things fall apart. Everything goes; in time everyone leaves---youth, night and day, rich and poor.”
Ultimately experience does this collection from the young talents. “Feel No Pain” includes also the recent works of much recognized Filipino artists Fernando Modesto, Guillermo Ramos and Butch Payawal.
"Feel No Pain" is a special project of Hiraya Gallery jointly with the upcoming “1st Congress of the Association of Southeast Asian Pain Societies”, an international convention spearheaded locally by the Pain Society of the Philippines.
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