Moonlight Sonata

1.          Bravo Carating!

Moonlight Sonata, as the exhibition is aptly titled, is at its best an engaging visual journey. Hopping once from one piece to the other is simply not enough. One has to do it a second time, a third time, and so on and so forth, without even getting tired. Everytime one sees a piece the second or nth time, he always sees and spots something new and thought provoking!

In Moonlight Sonata, Carating is back to nature. The natural world bursts in a technicolor explosion, that is very happy and very positive. The paintings are layers of personal experience of going back to essentials where each moment is highly nuanced, each memory is heavily glossed with patina, and each emotion is laden with both fun and fury.

The rich texturing is not only implied. It is generously physical, where each painting assumes the proportion of a weather beaten wall serving as mute witness to the very passage of life.

Carating successfully achieves this by incorporating pumice in its dust form with his metallic acrylics. 

Carating is one artist who is always in search of materials to enhance, if not improve, his texturing techniques. When he chanced upon this coarse pumice in an art store, he was on the verge of being claustrophobic with the austere geometric paintings the had become his identifying mark. 

An idea sparked in his mind! He thought of playing with the possibilities of the tectonic material in his art making. The virginal apparition of pumice together with his vertical and horizontal lines and crosshatchings has gestated into a highly spontaneous and gestural eruptions in his works.

Bravo Carating!

-- Rubén DF Defeo, Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, Department of Theory College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City