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In Transitives
By Randel Urbano

Each Acquatopia painting by Gamón involves colors spreading and splattering unto several layers of acrylic surfaces. Intuitively punctuated by cut spaces, the plastic panels give us glimpses of the more solid (yet still veiled) foundations of the composition. Literally, the works are decks of acrylic materials. The translucence and fragility of the layers coated by tempered amounts of paint can evoke many visual trajectories: The images may allude to familiar painterly vicinities of mountains, archipelagos, or fields seen from a bird’s point of view, while some figurations may instantly stimulate ruminations of wide seascapes or mirages through river troughs. We may also regard the works as microscopic documentations of made-up biomes. Much like specimen slides under a mechanical lens, the acrylic sheets become delicate containers of floral and faunal cells under examination, bursting with life. The abstraction encourages the viewer to select parts and sections from the works’ graphic properties to create a particular anecdote, setting, or contextualization. The images are nonetheless rooted from the artist’s idiolect of transubstantiating intimate thoughts and ideas into relatively larger formats, perhaps like scribbles of texts from the artist’s diary projected for panoramic reading.

The plural possibilities of meaning from Gamón’s collection are however forged and plied by the dictation beyond the framed works presented at Acquatopia. During her residency in Manila, the Spanish artist dutifully devotes time and thought in organizing each artwork as part of the cast, rendering each member indispensable. Wearing many hats, she proactively generates a prescribed walk-through of the works by being attentive of the works’ consecration on the walls, as she suggests the placement other materials: assigned wall palettes; enlarged photographs of Arctic and Palawan outdoor textures printed on vinyl as complementary environs to some framed works; and video installations of sea and ice. The artist accentuates the set by inscribing the algebraic coordinates of the featured sites. Through this added metaphoric manipulation, we can infer that the localities are to be sensed as elsewheres. These memorial places can be grasped, but they are still bound by the specter of anonymity. The raison d’être of abstraction – to question and consequentially to veer from forms, purposes, and expressions of verisimilitude – is balanced by Gamón’s care in exhibition design. A dominant image of the project is Amihan (Filipino colloquial term for northeast monsoon), a diptych of gradient hues mounted at the ‘proscenium’ of Galerie Stephanie. The graphic contours of the work, as it is with the others in the platoon of Acquatopia objects, seem to spill and exit the rectangular wooden framework. The painting’s structural boundaries do not limit us from easily connecting with the other works on the left, right, or behind our backs. The spirit of abstraction as wielded by Gamón enables us to look at the works as pieces of a whole. As a compact materialization of emulsified ideas, the Acquatopia project can nonetheless be treaded as a sequence of emotions or events. Due to abstraction, we are albeit encouraged to start wherever and whenever we desire. This demonstrates the artist’s scholastic comprehension of abstraction as a style, a technique, and an outlook affected by conceptual and current ingestion of histories of art. Part-homage and part-critique, she utilizes the (western) Academic standards of aspect ratios of paintings to contain her fluid scenarios. This interplay of theory and structure is apparent in her casual nomination of object titles which augments the volume of consumption of the images and forms: Is the piece titled Landscape a landscape? If the objects were presented under warm light, would they procure a new set of imagery and imagination? The artist fluently applies the established Beaux Arts proportions of framing as an attempt to question conventions of art viewing.

Gamón’s Acquatopia as a display of objects is also a feasible proposition to observe social transitivity: our relationships, the natural environment, the present conditions of community. Like the acrylic sheets and paint, are the multiple layers of our beings coalescing in our favor? Are we glazing and gradating ourselves toward the possibilities of genuine change? Have our personal and hyperreal expressions permitted us to become more empathetic, more aware of our limits? Are our performances in accord with our core? Do we actively transpose our introspections of progress into lucid realities? Through the artist’s aesthetics, can we discover the sincerity of the shared social constructs that we impose upon ourselves as existence?


Publication Appearances:

Philippine Star
“Spanish Artist Cristina Gamon Culminates Philippine residency with ‘Acquatopia'”
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Philippine Daily Inquirer
“Spanish contemporary artist Cristina Gamón holds first exhibit in Asia”
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Malaya Business Insight
“Acquatopia”
“Spanish contemporary artist Cristina Gamón holds first exhibit in Asia”
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Rogue Magazine
“Acquatopia’ Paints with All the Colors of the Wind”
By Emil Hofileña
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