Buen Abrigo and Anthony Palo debut in Galerie Joaquin Singapore

Galerie Joaquin Singapore presents the works of young contemporary artists Anthony Palo and Buen Abrigo in "Fast Forward" which opens on Friday, March 12 at 6:30PM at Galerie Joaquin Singapore, Unit 3, Ground Floor, The Regent Hotel, 1 Cuscaden Road. The exhibit will run until March 26.

In their works, both Palo and Abrigo present familiar images and icons of modern urban life but imbue them with a sensibility that takes a hard, critical look at these objects of mass consumption.

Palo’s works make use of bright playful colors and oval-faced figures that are staples in the entertainment fare of this generation weaned on comic books, manga, and anime. At the outset the viewer is lured into this familiar terrain but once he takes that step forward, he gets an unexpected jolt - there is none of the "cuteness" that is the hallmark of these much-coveted objects. They are amused commentaries on current urban living.

In "Aftermath of War The Ruins," the figures are shockingly stiff and detached, looking like they were rendered on flat surfaces and the heady blue clouds transform into unexpected fumes. Although the subject is grimly serious, Palo still succeeds in evoking smiles from his viewers.

A pervading sense of doom also permeates Palo’s canvases even when the figures are engaged in a seemingly fun activity such as that depicted in "Videoke Time with Michael The Big Giy, Hairball and The Cat Princess," the very anti-thesis of what their creators intended them to be.

Buen Abrigo, avant-garde painter by day and renegade graffiti artist by night, depicts an urban landscape with all its potential for doom but orchestrates all the elements in his canvases to present tongue-in-cheek but thought-provoking tableaus that make the viewer re-examine his views of the world.

In "Lost," for instance, a nuclear meltdown is depicted not as a dark landscape of smoldering ruins but a benign terrain with a tower sending forth not hellish fire but bursts of color and guarded with a robot-like figure carrying the shield of Captain America. Only a gas masked figure and a military type in the foreground hint at what the scene is all about.

In "The New Messiah I," the conflagration at the center of the canvas is again framed by bursts of color that mute the scene and serve as bulwarks preventing the seemingly fragile houses in the foreground from being engulfed in the flame. The donkey in the foreground and the man walking away unscathed also hint at life after such a holocaust.

Abrigo calls his art "an enigma." "Confined by the boundaries of a culturally dominated society and the forces of state-imposed class stratification, my work (using the process of juxtaposing architectural structures/urban landscapes with images from genres of the so-called superior mainstream culture) aims to articulate a multi-layered critique of the contradictory nature of the socio-economic divide and the expanding chasm between the rich and the poor," he says.

In "Fast Forward," Anthony Palo and Buen Abrigo invite viewers to take a second look at the world around them, open their minds and question long-held assumptions about popular icons of our time. The exhibit may be viewed until March 26.