Committed in being a showcase for new talent, Secret Fresh is proud to present two young artists whose exhibits will simultaneously open on June 2, Saturday, 6PM. FEU Fine Arts graduate Edric Go will be exhibiting for the first time with his show entitled Under The Hammer in the main exhibit space of Gallery A of Secret Fresh, while TUP alumnus Beejay Esber comes up to the challenge of setting up an installation cum painting saloon encapsulating his concept in a show entitled We’re Now Floating in Narrowed Space.
For his first solo exhibition, Edric Go reflects on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s assessment that “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it”. If art was indeed a hammer, would it be a weapon of construction, or would it destroy the society that it is trying to get itself away from? The exhibit entitled Under the Hammer reveals the poignant truths about the society that revolves around art, the artist discloses his notions on how art stipulates eternal solutions to the emergent problems of civilizations, but forever coming short on maneuvering probable remedies into realities, thus signaling the bogusness of art’s relationship with society. Under the Hammer would correspondingly define the struggles of an artist under the occurrences implied by his own culture, a dilemma on whether to shape society through one’s art, or to be shaped by the hammer of the art society, the latter often being whacked inside the halls of Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Beejay Esber’s 2nd solo exhibit titled We’re Now Floating In Narrowed Space seem a pronouncement of the rapid rise of vertical constructions that contribute to the increasing denseness of Metropolitan Manila, the city itself being denuded of natural views to be replaced by simulacrum encased in concrete embankments in airconditioned consumer palaces or to serve only as annotations, punctuations, after-thoughts to gilded modernist lobbies. Such views to missed vistas of the wild are squeezed further in the portrait formats of Esber’s landscape paintings, cropped, framed as doorways, all the more cramped in the partitioned glass box of the main gallery of Secret Fresh which is about less than a quarter of its main exhibit space. He has in such a way crystallized the very idea of place to mere image in such a set-up. Illusions of perspective in the usual depiction of space and place are flattened, narrowed to the contrapuntal field of horizon where infinity is plumbed sideways.
Under The Hammer and We’re Now Floating in Narrowed Space will both be on view until June 19, 2012 at Gallery A of Secret Fresh. For more inquiries, please call 570-9815 loc 7. Secret Fresh is open from Tuesdays to Saturdays from 2-10PM. Secret Fresh is located at Ronac Art Center, Ortigas Avenue, Greenhills, San Juan, Metro Manila.
Cover: Ellen Adarna
