The drawings serve as blueprints for art objects whose own language has become muddled in mixed messages of fine art and design. Eustaquio uses the most basic forms of art vocabulary (the sphere, the triangle, the square) mashed up with a variety of images or still life. As an idea,Figure Babel proposes works as objects that may be read as either art or design or both. That our perception of artisanship remains as dialect to the main language that is art- that the language of art has become this Babylon- has been the central fascination of Eustaquio’s art practice.

About the Artist

Born in 1977 and based in Manila, Patricia Perez Eustaquio is one of the leading Filipino artists of her generation. She works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, and installation. Informed by the vocabulary of craft and design, her work explores the vanity of artistic and cultural constructs, referencing the histories and processes related to different materials by crafting highly decorative objects and then excising various elements, thereby creating a stark contrast between what is present and what is absent. She is noted for her large, ornately shaped canvases on which she paints magnified details from Old Master still life paintings, sometimes focusing on haunting imagery such as dead birds and butchered meat. Her sculptural work explores the expressive possibilities of humble materials such as lace, felt, and cardboard, bringing to them an unexpected monumentality.

Her ghost forms constructed out of handmade lace stiffened with resin function as shrouds that take on the shape of the absent objects they memorialize. The iconic work of this series, Psychogenic Fugue, a piano-shaped lace shroud, has been included in exhibitions at the Hong Kong Art Centre (2010) and at the Singapore Art Museum (2012). In the past two years, she had several solo exhibitions in Manila, Singapore, Taipei, and New York.