Monthly Archives: March 2009

Elmer Roslin mounts his 5th Solo Exhibition at the Blue Line Gallery, 4th Floor Rustan’s Makati,

show opens on March 14,  2009 with an artists receptionat 5pm.

We hope you can come.

Please visit http://bluelinegallery.multiply.com or visit our Facebookprofile (username : Blue Line)  

The Nowhere Man by Ms. Trickie Lopa

He’s a real nowhere man

Sitting in his Nowhere Land

Making all his nowhere plans

For nobody

Elmer Roslin has always identified with the urban Pinoy Everyman.  In his earlier shows, TAuMBAYAN and Lust In Paint, both at Boston Gallery, and his 2006 solo exhibit at the Big and Small Art Gallery in Megamall, we have seen a whole body of work on the average Juan:  theubiquitous tambay hanging out in internet cafes, mourners gambling at a street corner wake, lovers meeting illicitly in motel rooms, the pool sharks and cue artists crowding billiard halls scattered around a congested city. Through him, we have become voyeurs, spectators of the everyday details that make up contemporary Filipino metropolitan life. 

In this latest suite of acrylic and oil paintings, Roslin makes us observers of a different sort. In his 2008 solo exhibition, Inside Your Nights and Days at the Kaida Gallery, he filled his canvases with lone figures, distorted in the manner of Francis Bacon.  This signaled the beginning of a stylistic shift, altering his images from densely packed scenes to that of one central subject. This shift continues with Nowhere Man, Roslin’s fifth solo show at the Blueline Gallery. He moves us from involved yet emotionally detached witnesses to introspective participants.  With him we begin to ask questions:  on motives, goals, impulses.

Roslin takes the show’s title from a 1965 hit by The Beatles, a song composed by John Lennon for the movie Yellow Submarine.  They sing of an aimless man who goes through life haphazardly, unconcernedly.

Nowhere Man is also a title of one of Roslin’s works in this exhibit.

As with all his other canvases, he adopts a muted palette, of dull browns and grays.  The piece depicts a man from waist up, his thoughts seemingly far away. From his back, like a mutant, springs another head, facing the opposite direction.  The resulting grotesque figure underscores the ludicrousness of a man who “doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to.” 

Another piece, Looking For Exit brings us to another Nowhere Man:  the cad who refuses to commit.  Here he confronts us, locked with a woman in a suffocating embrace, situated at the center of rising water, drowning in the sea of relationship demands.  We witness his mini-me running for his life, seeking an escape from romantic obligations.  In Makata he becomes the philosopher with jumbled thoughts in his head, paralyzed by analysis, unable to take action.  We see another variation in Some Place Safe, a broody, surly Nowhere Man consumed by a secret, perhaps of a double life still in the closet. 

The Missing Piece illustrates the Nowhere Man’s dilemma best, that of a broken, damaged being taking pains to solve a puzzle.  Shouldn’t he fix himself first?

The call to paint hits Elmer Roslin at random moments, following no particular schedule or set routine.  Until he hears this call, he remains the vigilant bystander, a keen onlooker to the foibles and follies of the typical Pinoy on the street.  He keeps his senses attuned to the daily occurrences that make life, and his art, both interesting. 

Doesn’t have a point of view

Knows not where he’s going to

Isn’t he a bit like you and me? 

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 Nino Quartana

VOLCANO @ the Ayala Museum

7 – 21 March 2009

Italian artist Nino Quartana’s collection of 25 paintings in mixed media, VOLCANO is inspired by the artist’s own musings and perceptions, brought to the fore ostensibly by time spent in the vicinity of the Philippine’s own perfect Mayon, where Quartana vicariously experienced the everyday reality of the nearby fishing community of Santo Domingo on two separate occasions for workshops. There, steeped in the aesthetic balm of nature’s amazing perfection, viewing it in all times of day and night; light and dark; in stillness and silence and in the hubbub of village activity, cognizant of the mountain’s potent power of both creation and destruction, Quartana imbibed the volcano’s essence, where it resonated with a long-present pervading interest in the nature of energy, creativity and change.

The exhibit brings together a collection of surreal landscapes and portraits that eloquently communicate the artist’s view on the sublime power and the paradoxical nature embodied by the volcano, something Quartana has repeatedly experienced first-hand to be a font of invigoration.

At once a guardian and a potential destroyer, the volcano of Quartana’s paintings takes on many guises: a faint ghost-like presence of benevolent spirit; the central figure etched darkly into a landscape of maelstrom and movement; a distant vantage point of focus beyond tumultuous seas, a backdrop for the community that it both sustains and ominously holds in sway. In many paintings, the iconic Philippine jeepney, itself a manifestation of the creative force that Quartana considers akin to the volcano, a figure that augurs energy, color, motion and hope, makes an almost contrapuntal appearance that both echoes and contrasts the volcano’s gigantic steady presence.

Symbolically represented by the people Quartana has chosen to paint in portrait, this same spirit of the volcano is evident in these icons of energy, creativity and dynamism, individuals who, through a spectrum of social milieu, have piqued and turned the tide of public interest, inspired by their talent and achievement, provoked thought and growth and inevitably wrought change both within and without. Counting among these luminaries are Philippine renaissance man and hero Jose Rizal, influential painter Juan Luna, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama , Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Jewish-German born physicist Einstein, Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona and French singer Edith Piaf.

This is the central idea behind Nino Quartana’s art: that it is a medium of exchange and provocation, not just artifact but a profound experience of exploration that brings together the notion of the aesthetic, the intellect and the spirit. Quartana’s mantra echoes palpably in each painting as something that goes beyond images that soothe or propel one into flights of fancy, but rather, engages the onlooker as participant, invokes discourse and begins a process of questioning, challenge, insight and affirmation or revolution, an embodiment of the paradox and zen equilibrium of life that is the volcano energy.

VOLCANO will be on exhibit until March 21, 2009 at the Ayala Museum, ArtistSpace, 2^nd Floor, Glass Wing, Makati Avenue cor. Dela Rosa Street, Makati City. Entrance is free.

-Joanna Altomonte Abrera

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