Drawing from the question, ‘what does contemporary Philippine art look like?’, Lorenzo thought up Postlocal two years ago.  Selected artists come together for a group show, yet this time, the artists do not belong to the same immediate environment. This time it’s about the work as extensions of the artists that come together. Generally unfamiliar with each other’s histories and processes, isolated practice metamorphosing into shared experience is the premise of this show.

On its second year, Postlocal features Paris-based Gaston Damag and Manila-based artists Pow Martinez and Lynyrd Paras.

Gaston Damag, the most senior artist of the show, has been working with the Ifugao bulol for the last twenty-five years, a practice amplified by being away for about the same amount of time. Tasked to do three paintings, he instead “decided to use my own photography as a base to attempt to do paintings”. Removed from what he calls the romantic blank canvas, he does the inverse of painting by bleaching his photographs to reveal different forms and purposes.

Damag says, “on canvas you have the relation with the rich material, heavy in history; while working on photography as a base is like doing a painting without starting it”. The resulting images, photographs with clearly bleached lines and grids, are naïve. This, in line with Damag’s previous use of basic, almost childlike, processes, such as finger painting. The resulting images however are powerful and calculatedly violent. The bulol figures he is known for are in the images, but they are erased, albeit not deliberately. In the acid burn of the paper is simultaneously a release from the image and a memory of what was used to be.

Pow Martinez presents battlefields. His landscapes are littered with the victorious and their vanquished. In one canvas, little blue figures are surrounded by much larger green figures, spears drawn. The painting is simultaneously silly and dead serious.  A second piece entitled Crusader 2030 is a portrait: a female warrior brandishing a shield against radioactive pink sky. The color palette and painting style are far from realist, but the commentary on trophy wars and their consequences is unmistakable.

Lynyrd Paras, known for his monochromatic portraits of layered faces, is coming to the show from a decidedly local Manila point of view. Each portrait is a story. Compositing a new face from family and friends from his inner circle, Lynyrd’s visual layering is taken from specific experiences of his subjects. Stepping back however, they are metaphors for the multiple facades and defenses people use—the strengths that show, the weaknesses that remain hidden.

Interacting only through the exhibition, Gaston, Pow and Lynyrd allow their work to be complete extensions of themselves. With familiarization and connection through the works, the pieces become the basis of a community built.  

POSTLOCAL 2011 curated by Isa Lorenzo with Gaston Damag, Pow Martinez, and Lynyrd Paras opens simultaneously with Wet by Neal Oshima at the Silverlens Gallery; and Assemblage: Project 3 by Julius Clar at 20Square.