Contemporary Artists

of the Philippines
Contemporary art
• is the art of today, produced by artists who are living in the
twenty-first century.
• It provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary society
and the issues relevant to ourselves, and the world around
us. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced,
culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world.
 Ronald Ventura
• His work embodies
this complexity
through the
juxtaposition
(contrast) of motifs
from East and West,
high and low culture,
old and young, past
and present.
 Ronald Ventura
• His paintings and sculptures feature a
complex layering of images and
styles, symbolic of the multifaceted
national identity of the Philippines, a
country that throughout history has
seen the influence of colonization by
the United States, Spain and
Japan on its indigenous culture.
 Ronald Ventura
• He broke the record for any
Southeast Asian painting sold at
auction in 2011 at Sotheby’s Hong
Kong with his graphite, oil and acrylic
work Grayground at $1.1 million.
Ronald Ventura, ‘Blind Child’, 2011. Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 122 cm | Courtesy the artist and Tyler
Rollins Fine Art
 Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
• Their work speaks of
community, personal
experience, memory,
displacement, and
the emotional and
psychological affects
of migration.
 Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
• They use objects as a metaphor of
everyday human life, carriers of
messages, memories and
experiences.
 Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
• Project Be-Longing: In Transit (2006),
at the Biennale ofSydney Zones of
Contact directly resulted from their
emigration. Made
with balikbayan boxes, traditionally used
by Filipinos to ship their belongings
around the world, the installation evoked
their personal voyage and speaks of
displacement and personal trauma.
 Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
• Dream Blanket Project (2002-2007),
an installation of neatly folded and
stacked blankets donated by locals,
placed in open-fronted cabinets, with
a hidden sound system broadcasting
the dreamers – the donors –
recounting their dreams.
 Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
• Project Another Country:
Address (2008), made of the contents
of 140 balikbayan boxes, each
carefully packed with personal items
donated by the local Philippine
community to their family as they
arrived in Brisbane.
 Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
• In-Habit: Project Another
Country (2012) at the Sherman
Contemporary Art Foundation was a
floor-to-ceiling installation of miniature
cardboard houses, made by the
artists and by the local community
 Mark Salvatus
• He is a co-founder of
ephemeral street art
group Pilipinas Street
Plan (2006) and 98B
Collaboratory (2012)
• Issues of urbanism
and everyday politics
are central concerns
 Mark Salvatus
• He positions himself in the realm of
the everyday and life experience,
extending beyond the locale in which
he works to encompass the places to
which he travels.
• Works range from drawing,
photography and video to installation
and interactive projects.
 Mark Salvatus
• For Latitudes (2014) at the Cultural
Center of the Philippines, Salvatus
presented three works engaging with
socio-political issues surrounding the
resources of land, air and water.
 Mark Salvatus
• This invisible link is rendered visible
through commonalities, as represented in
Salvatus’ Haiku (2012): a video projection
of photos of graffiti tags taken during his
travels in Japan, New
York, Australia, Indonesia and Philippines.
The tags represent a universal element
and seem to be in dialogue with one
another, crossing borders.
 Gary-Ross Pastrana
• Familiar objects are
deconstructed in the
conceptual works to
the point of becoming
unrecognizable and
taking on a new form,
meaning and function
 Gary-Ross Pastrana
• He is interested in the consequences of
transforming the physicality of an object
and how the connotations attached to the
originals are affected by the
transformation. According to the artist, ‘all
objects are in fact, provisional …their
identity, materiality, image, and usage, all
depend on a mass consensus which in
itself is a construct.’
 Gary-Ross Pastrana
• Set Fire to Free (2002) explores how an
object can still retain its
‘wholeness’or ‘thing-ness’ even if it’s
already broken and no longer functions
as it was designed to. Pastrana
destroyed a ladder and burnt part of it,
making a bird out of its ashes and placing
it on the remaining ladder fragments.
• In Two Rings (2008), he melted two of his
mother’s rings and shaped them into a
sword object.
 Gary-Ross Pastrana
• He was interested in finding out where the
personal value and sentimentality with certain
jewelry really resides. Through their merging,
their monetary value would not be lost, while
their sentimental value, according to the artist,
would be heightened by making them part of
one and the same. Pastrana reconfigures
reality and becomes a transformative agent,
revealing ‘perception, truth, value, data and all
other measurements that define an entity rest
on the fragile notions of wholeness and the
ruling order.‘
Gary-Ross
Pastrana, Untitled
(Horizon), 2014.
Collage | Courtesy
the artist and
Silverlens
 Costantino Zicarelli
• A self-proclaimed failed
musician and graffiti
artist, whose works often
reflect the history of
drone metal, black metal
and everything rock n’
roll, as exemplified in his
exhibition Into the
Abyss (2011).
 Costantino Zicarelli
• As white as moonlight, as white as bone,
as dark as the snake, as dark as the
throne is the title of his 2013 exhibition,
which echoes the lyricism of black metal
songs.
 Costantino Zicarelli
• Exploring ‘the dark side of pop culture’,
Zicarelli’s drawings in shades of graphite grey
and black and mirror shards, reveal images of
skulls, dark forests, locks hanging in tangles,
disco balls, smashed guitars, dead rock stars
and tattoo emblems.
 Costantino Zicarelli
• Zicarelli explains that his practice is ‘not
about the idea of sex, drugs and rock n’
roll or being a fan boy. He is more
interested in putting a less chaotic line
between the subculture scene and the
idea of using reality as fictional tools, or
vice versa
 Rodel Tapaya
• Weaves contemporary
reality with folk
narratives in a vibrant
tableaux that draw
inspiration from his
research into folktales
and pre-colonial history.
• Mountain Fantasies (2012) stands as a
social commentary on mining and
preservation of nature.
• The painting, now in the Tiroche De Leon
collection and on show at the 10th Gwangju
Biennale 2014, features imagery from Filipino
folklore, merging multiple narratives and diverse
allegorical references. A depiction of a giant
canine saving people accompanies other folk
tales relating to the origins of mountains, floods
and creatures. Tapaya’s underlying message is
one of caution about the greed and folly of man
and environmental destruction.
Rodel Tapaya,’ Care of Kabunian, numbered but cannot be counted’, 2001.
Acrylic on canvas, 304.8 x 609.6 cm, on display at Singapore Art Museum,
2012 | © Choo Yut Shing/Flickr
 Norberto Roldan
• Founder of Black Artists
in Asia (1986), a
Philippines-based group
focused on socially and
politically progressive
practice, and Green
Papaya Art Projects,
addresses social,
political and cultural
issues in the Philippines.
 Norberto Roldan
• His assemblage of text, images and found
objects address issues surrounding everyday
life, history and collective memory. Roldan has a
fascination for old objects and whether they
cease to matter once they are discarded or
forgotten in a trunk or an attic. His artistic
process engages with the ways in which an
object can be re-appropriated in another context,
in an anthropological study that blurs the
boundaries between past and present.
F16 (2012) explores the negotiation of power
in geopolitical encounters, drawing a
relationship between the colonization of the
Philippines and today’s global events, and
stands as a critique to the US government
and its foreign policies.
Norberto Roldan, ‘Sacred Is The New Profane 1’, (diptych), 2010. Assemblage
with found objects, 24 x 48 inches | Courtesy the artist and Lightbombs
Contemporary
 Louie Cordero
• The richly ornamented and grotesquely
humorous multimedia works merge
indigenous traditions, Spanish Catholicism
and American pop culture, expressing a long
history of tension and colonialism.
 Louie Cordero
• His vibrantly colored surrealist compositions,
whether painted or cast in fiberglass, graphically
draw from imagery and aesthetics of b-movie
horror films, heavy metal music, comics, local
folktales and stories, street life and mythology.
Offering highly personalized and idiosyncratic
recounts of a chaotic contemporary world,
Cordero’s work engages with issues dear to
most of his contemporaries, which stem from a
colonial past and a Catholic upbringing.
 Louie Cordero
• Cordero presented an installation
comprising paintings and sculptures
entitledMy We, inspired by the recent
karaoke killings of people singing Frank
Sinatra’s My Way in bars around the
Philippines.
Louie Cordero, ‘My we’,
2011. 1 of 4 sculptures,
fibreglass, steel, acrylic,
found objects. Part of a larger
installation commissioned by
the Singapore Biennale,
Singapore Art Museum 2011 |
© Bernard Oh/Flickr
 Martha Atienza
• This mixed background is reflected in her
work, which predominantly uses video as
the form of expression.
• Standing between imagination and
understanding, her work is a sort of
sociological study of her environment.
 Martha Atienza
• Standing between
imagination and
understanding, her
work is a sort of
sociological study of
her environment.
 Martha Atienza
• The video installation is homage to the history of
ocean voyages and experiences at sea, inspired
in part by her father’s past as a sea captain.
With a moving video of the sea refracted through
a glass of water and accompanied by the sound
of the ocean, the work captures the illusion of
moving waters and suggests a hallucination of
long periods spent at sea.
Martha Atienza ‘Endless Hours at Sea’, 2014. Video installation | Courtesy
the artist and Ateneo Art Gallery
 José Santos III
• Has been creating
work that challenges
our perception of the
everyday and of
reality since the
beginning of his
career.
 José Santos III
• In his work, whether painting, sculpture, assemblage or
installation, Santos has developed a cryptic iconography
with messages that are often elusive, leaving space for
new interpretations. In his recent work, he continues to
explore his fascination with objects, in an effort to
uncover their histories, while at the same time obscure
and complicate our perception and understanding of
familiar, everyday things, and pushes us to notice what
otherwise would be hidden from view.
José Santos III exhibition “²hide” at Pearl
Lam Galleries, Singapore, 2014. Installation
view | Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries and
Olivia Kwok
Thank you!