Seriality tempts us to fixate on the most obvious deviations in Maria Taniguchi's new work. In a suite of square canvases painted checkered, a portion stripped of paint or a section wherein color does not take may mean disengaging from the illusion of symmetry or the body reaching its limit. In both cases, pattern asks us to reckon with its gesture and technology of iteration. In Taniguchi's work, each canvas is created using silkscreen, using a thin layer of paint. Labor and resource in these works persistently insist themselves in the attempts at repetition. The abstraction assured by the grid and achieved by the gradation is cultivated against considerations material and bodily. It is within this framework that Taniguchi, in developing a set of paintings that comprise a singular work, articulates a method of engaging with space. The sequence of checkered canvases and the ambient purples of the unembellished paintings structure the main gallery space of Silverlens. For the artist, the paintings draw out the psychic character of materials: the checkered pattern foregrounds expectation and regularity, the atmospheric swatches play out variations of intensity and tempers mood, the color creates the experience of warm interiors. The artist inhabits this space by way of pigment: a rich reddish violet used for landscapes and botanical illustrations and that makes for vivid shadows. Taniguchi's practice is built on these fixations—these painstakingly careful considerations that allow the material, gesture, disposition to craft a method to abstraction that is conceptual as it is affective. The room's scheme mimics the alternating pattern of the paintings, and with it, a spatial experience of seriality, something only palpable at a certain scale, a certain measure. This is a tension that keeps our interest: the austerity of each painting requires an attentiveness that disperses as one walks across the interior architecture, entrances us again as we look closely, as we account for the most obscure recurrences: a speck of canvas missed by paint, a deepening hue.
Carlos Quijon Jr.
2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension
Makati City
Manila, 1231
Philippines
www.silverlensgalleries.com
+63 2 88160044
+63 917 587 4011 (Fax)
Tuesday – Saturday
10am – 5pm