MAYNILA MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS, THE DAY IS SCORNFUL ARNDT SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS. BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35 WWW.ARNDTBERLIN.COM CURRATEDBYNORMANCRISOLOGO TATONG RECHETA TORRES MIKE ADRAO POW MARTINEZ NORBERTO ROLDAN GABBY BARREDO JOSE LEGASPI JIGGER CRUZ ZEAN CABANGIS KAWAYAN DE GUIA JOSE TENCE RUIZ SANTI BOSE DEX FERNANDEZ KALOY SANCHEZ ALFREDO ESQUILLO ALWIN REAMILLO ARNDT SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS. BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35 WWW.ARNDTBERLIN.COM Working in contemporary art is a privilege and the collaboration with living artists exiting and permanent source of inspiration and surprise. Working with a curator is an additional thrill for the dealer, as when giving „Carte Blanche“ to an external expert, the galerist himself is joining the audience, in their „Vorfreude“/enthusiastic anticipation for the venue. Like every other passionate art viewer the gallery owner is trying to imagine what the final show will look like, impatient to witness the dialogues the various works will enter with another. I am that fortunate galerist and Norman Crisologo is the curator of MAYNILA: MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW (MANILA: THE DAY IS SCORNFUL, THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS). Norman Crisologo is not just an expert for Filippino Contemporary Art, he is also a collector, early-on supporter and follower of many artists careers but most importantly he is the artists friend. The idea for this show was born during one of the fascinating expeditions Norman, Insider and connoisseur of the incredibly rich and vibrant Philippine artworld, took me on. I immediately realised that if I would like to understand the recent developements in Contemporary Philippine Art better, I would have to explore Manila further. This vast, haunting, most vibrant and complex social and cultural organism that accomodates so many of this countries major artists, providing them stories, conflict and issues, some of the sourcematerial for their work. In one of our conversations, Norman Crisologo said that this exhibition will be more about evoking a „feeling“ than making a curatorial statement and far from claiming a comprehensive overview about Filippino Contemporary Art. I see this presentation as an „insiders guide“ and open invitation to go on a journey to the darker side of Manila, where the inspiration lays for so many visual artists, performing artists and filmmakers. Following in their footsteps and spirit we can get our own „Manila-Feeling“ and insight in this fascinating artistic universe. I thank Norman Crisologo for this incredibly generous contribution of enthusiasm, knowledge and passion with which he brought this exhibition together and for his support and advice to the artists during the production period. My utmost gratitude goes to the artists for accepting our invitation and contributing such outstanding new work to the show. And last but never the least, I would like to thank Sonia Jakimczyk, our gallery manager in Singapore and Tobias Sirtl, Lisa Polten and Karina Rozwadowska in Berlin for their steady and kind support. MattHIAS ARNDT I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY, AND I JUST SAID IT. NORMAN CRISOLOGO “PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF...” It can be said that if you wander in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, you will either become a prophet or a madman. Or perhaps both. But in Manila, it seems that it doesn’t take that long. As much as the city itself is a bustling metropolis, it is also a wasteland of the lost. Stand long enough in a corner and you can spot them: these solitary figures that stand, for all the world rushing past them, alone. Approaching them, you may even catch their attention long enough for them to return your stare… and then look past you. Move in even closer, you might even begin to discern their voices above the din, maybe reciting strange litanies to deities that have long absconded their houses of dwelling and left them to the devout and faithful to loiter in—or rather they may be in conversation with the city itself, allowing it to speak to them through the bang and clatter of the sidewalk, the cacophony of the car horns in traffic, or the susurrus of the waves from the bay. Arguably, these are true citizens of Manila, who are not mere fixtures in the urban landscape but possibly, keep the vision of the city alive—even if only in their minds. “Maynila: Maalinsangan ang Gabi, Mahapdi ang Araw” (Manila: The Nights are Restless, The Days are Scornful), is an exhibition of Filipino contemporary art that collects these visions and hears those voices. It chronicles a secret history of Manila—one that also considers the graffiti scrawled on the walls and counts the chalk outlines on the pavement as part of its story. There are no heroes and villains here, just the usual suspects. And all endings resound like the conclusion of prayers. ERWIN ROMULO TATONG RECHETA TORRES There is something cinematic in the paintings of Tatong Recheta Torres. Like stills from a complex and indecipherable feature film, his canvases capture a specific moment, not necessarily one full of tension or suspense, but one of anticipation. They are frames that signal that something is about to happen. This cinematic sensibility comes naturally from a man who grew up under the shadows of downtown Manila’s once esteemed but now derelict cinemas, and whose childhood was nourished by a diet of horror and fantasy films in Betamax format. An architecture graduate, Torres is mostly entirely self-taught in the vocation of painting, though his apparent skill as a draughtsman is the product of early practice. The shifts one finds every time Torres releases a body of work reflect a restless desire for experimentation. He takes up the challenge of representing texture—scales, globules, hair—as a means to build his fictive worlds. His recent obsession with virtual reality feeds newer works where images tamed by pixels and code cross with dreamy scenes culled from memory. MIKE ADRAO In an age enamored with installation, conceptual, or performance art, does good old drawing still have a chance to be recognized? Artists like Mike Adrao show that draughtsmanship still matters and that drawing remains a dynamic and unexhausted field. His large, charcoal canvases depicting anthropomorphic and biological forms show control, rigor and imagination. These images—each one teeming with intricate detail—are first born in his trusted sketchbook. On a large canvas inside his tiny studio above an Internet cafe, the mild-mannered Adrao lays them out and pieces them together in a slow, deliberate, physically demanding but sometimes meditative process. For this show, his ruminations on the sinister qualities of the city— the decadence, the corruption, the environmental negligence, the temptations of wealth and power—yield a charcoal, chiaroscuro work that is an allegory of life in the Philippine capital. It shows how little by little one is consumed by the grip of its structures and systems. Integrating Philippine currency vignettes and lacework, exploding manunggol jars and reptilian elements, the work can be turned upside-down, mimicking the topsy-turvy manner of existence in a desperately dense and chaotic setting. POW MARTINEZ Irreverent, farcical, fantastic. Such can be said of the paintings of Pow Martinez, whose images range from improbable, cartoonish scenes executed in rough strokes to heavy impastos that near abstraction. He remains a believer of painting, of its endurance and inexhaustible potential. Perhaps the genre now suffers from the ease of falling to predictability and commoditization, which Martinez heavily guards his practice against. And so what he delivers are works that echo the city he lives in: brash and unpredictable, never tame. Consider his two pieces here. One depicts the contortions of a hermaphrodite-like figure whose breasts and other extremities pull out like gum. The other mimics a familiar high point of many suspense films: the dining scene. We bear witness to what is supposed to be a revolting instance of cannibalism, but Martinez has caricatured it to an almost comic effect. Such works reveal the irony that has become a leitmotif in the artist’s practice. Another is the fight against safe, sentimental, and pleasure-seeking aesthetics. Yes, this might be bad art for some, but perhaps rebellion is the point of the exercise. This hard-headedness and certain distrust for the ruling convention may have rubbed off from living in a city that saw many revolutions, and has long prized freedom of expression and individuality. Martinez confides he likes the city’s dirt and grit, and he allows his paintings to be similarly so. He prefers to ransack what is from the underground, the counterculture, the juvenile. Settling for what is mainstream is just plain insulting. NORBERTO ROLDAN “Every act an artist makes is political,” says Norberto Roldan. In his paintings, installations, or intricate assemblages, one can always detect the biting social criticism in his works. Be it attacks on colonialism and rampant consumerism or oppressive systems of power, he has made his practice an avenue not just of personal expression but pure activism. For him, it is unconscionable that an artist does not engage. “One cannot turn a blind eye on political reality, no matter how apolitical your art may be.” To Roldan, every artist is part of a community and a country, and his practice has to find its place within these. Such political decisions extend to activities far beyond art-making. One example is his founding and running of Green Papaya Art Projects, one of the longest- running artist-run initiatives in Manila. It supports alternative and unrepresented voices and encourages critical discourse. His work “Quiapo: Between Salvation and Damnation” involves a simulacrum of the famed Manila church that has been central to the city’s cultural and political histories.