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, 2nd Floor, Glass Wing, Makati Avenue cor. Dela Rosa Street, Makati City. Entrance is free.
-Joanna Altomonte Abrera
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