24 July - 25 August 2024
Tactile Mantras
Lui Gonzales, Ronyel Compra
Mementos often trigger a sensory response to the owner and viewer. This can aid in organizing remembrance, as in the case of Tactile Mantras, where both artists present works exploring how objects support our cognitive processes.
Gonzales zoomed in on an image of her belongings and drew them. For her, this serves as an act of looking even closer, still with her usual process of tearing layered drawings, suggesting that memory creates a simultaneous bombardment of images. Adding documentation of the entire process through lists that define moments of shifting from one pen to another, the moment an exact type of pen was replaced, and the number of times the sheets were torn. These lists represent detailed diaries that help the artist tap into her sublime decisions while in the process of creating.
Compra's shift from his usual charcoal and natural pigment works to returning to oil painting is a significant transformation. Despite this change, he continues to use scratches to depict multiple chairs, which he sees as symbols of resilience and territoriality. The scratches, he explains, are an occupant's raw and primal instinct to leave marks that assert ownership and survival.
Tactile Mantras presents personal records of the artists' reflections and meditations translated into physical form, which ritualistically aids in vivid memory. Overall, the pieces underscore the complex interplay between memory and our interactions with our external environment. These, in turn, shape our experiences and perceptions over time.
Text by Raymond Carlos
Lui Gonzales (b.1993)combines portraiture with everyday life in the Philippines. Drawing on layers of tracing paper, she portrays her observation of the world through a blanket of images that are then torn apart and re-arranged. She trained at the Philippine High School for the Arts and received her BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She was one of the delegates who represented the Philippines at the 2010 ASEAN Youth Camp for Visual Arts in Hanoi, Vietnam. Her works have been presented in exhibitions here and abroad, particularly in Singapore and Indonesia. In 2020, she was the finalist for the Ateneo Art Gallery's Marciano Galang Acquisition Prize.
Ronyel Compra (b.1985) is a visual artist who experiments with indigenous materials such as non-commercial charcoal, twigs, pebbles, corn cobs, cow bones, and skulls to materialize his works in different formats: painting, video, sculptural installations, performances, and printmaking. Heavily influenced by the discovery of historical and personal accounts in communities, Compra integrates the techniques used in local crafts production and trades into his practice in assessing memory and history, particularly narratives from his hometown of Bogo in the northern part of Cebu. He received his BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines, Cebu, and was a finalist for the Ateneo Art Awards in 2019. In 2020, he completed an artist residency program at the Bellas Artes Projects in Bataan. Compra is a recipient of the NoExit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour— Philippines through Para Site Hong Kong.
