For Clarence Chun (b.1975) and Luis Lorenzana (b.1979), CCxLL emerged from a mutual interest in engaging with one another’s respective approaches to the same painterly queries: composition, form, technique, and colour. In this collaboration, the longtime friends unveil a series of three modestly sized square canvases, where their visual languages interact and play on singular planes. To contextualise their collaborative works, MONO8 also presents a series of new and old paintings and works on paper by Chun and Lorenzana that offer insight into their individual practices.

Chun’s abstract paintings are intricate explorations of speed and time. The artist was trained at the Yale School of Art by abstract painter Jake Berthot who told Chun, “Your paintings are about speed, but you have to slow it down in order to show it.” These works’ compositional format informs the speed in which he paints; square depicts a slow speed, rectangle an average speed, and elongated landscapes the fastest. Each band traverses the canvas to suggest momentum and direction. Yet thick globs of paint disrupt these trajectories, asserting dimensionality and transitioning the work from the second dimension to the third.

A highly technical and precise painter, Chun utilises a three-part process to create his compositions. First, he washes the canvas with random colours of paint in thin stripes. Next, Chun carefully masks the surface with hand-cut strips of tape, varying in width. Last, he deploys what he calls the “micro” in which he adds small details spontaneously chosen and inspired from a number of resources that include memories from his life, pop culture and art historical references such as European modernity and East Asian painterly traditions. Chun’s recent paintings are also largely influenced by the ocean, which comprises a central part of his life in Oahu: “While swimming in the ocean, everything is in flux so my visual perception of my surroundings constantly changes. I love the fact that even the horizon line moves up, down, and even tilts.”

For Lorenzana, there is a similar preoccupation with challenging painting’s traditions. The Heads works emerged as the artist’s most recent series and plays upon portraiture’s art historical tradition. Earlier sketches like Mr Swabe (2014) or Drawing 2 (2016) already reveal Lorenzana’s preceding interest in distorting the genre as he renders impish and unsettling portraits of circus characters. In his intimate 2024 series, Lorenzana departs from mimesis, opting instead to strip down, warp, and rebuild the sitter until they become completely abstracted. What remains are large, colourful, rectangular heads that occupy almost the entirety of the canvas.

In contrast to Chun, Lorenzana’s practice is entirely self-taught. His professional background in public administration and in the Philippine Senate makes him keenly attuned to people. This social intelligence is perhaps what informs his portraiture such that no two depictions are the same. Each is unique in the subtleties of colour and facial features. Some of his subjects are actual people, while others remain fictional. Inevitably, however, the complete anonymisation of each (real or fake) sitter’s physiognomy further augments Lorenzana’s interest in the nonrepresentational, transcending form and meaning.

Chun and Lorenzana’s joint works, CCxLL, riff on one another’s exploratory painting strategies. Chun uses his characteristic masking method to create Baconian demarcations of space, with bold angular bands adding depth against dark backgrounds. The bold angular bands imbue a sense of depth against the black backgrounds. Subtly rendered lines evoke landscapes, endowing a meta-like quality to the composition and engaging with the legacy and reinterpretation of tradition. Lorenzana’s signature heads, scaled down and scattered throughout the composition, rework the painterly surface in an almost disorienting manner. The visages’ undulating pattern, rendered in vivid colours, juxtapose the composition’s otherwise dark aura. In these co-authored works, Chun and Lorenzana push the boundaries of painting as a medium, creating pieces that are simultaneously elegant, intricate, and rich in meaning.

Text by Marv Recinto