Art gallery MONO8 has teamed up visual artists Clarence Chun and Luis Lorenzana for the first time with their works pushing the lines of traditional techniques. The exhibition titled CCxLL, opened on October 16 and will run until November 24 at MONO8 Gallery located BLK 113, 53 Connecticut Street, Greenhills, San Juan City.
In Chun’s paintings, the artist is interested in pushing the boundaries of technique by visualizing speed and time. His multi-stage process of washing, masking, and detailing his canvases manifest in sweeping bands of color that suggest momentum and direction. Chun’s abstractions articulate memories from his life, pop culture references, and broader art histories of modernism.
Within Lorenzana’s work, there is a similar preoccupation with challenging painting’s traditions. The Heads series particularly plays upon portraiture’s art historical tradition. Here, Lorenzana builds upon the genre’s mimetic convention, stripping down, warping, and rebuilding the sitter until they are totally abstracted.
The two painters will also unveil their very first collaborative series in which their respective approaches to the same painterly queries — composition, form, technique, color — coalesce on shared canvases.
Chun and Lorenzana’s joint works, in turn, riff on one another’s exploratory strategies. The resulting compositions push the potential of painting as a medium and coalesce in works that are simultaneously elegant, intricate, and rife with meaning.
Chun primarily works in abstraction to reveal narratives hinged on the artist’s relationship with the places he had lived, particularly the influence of the bodies of water as a dominant force in his dynamic approach to image-making. Chun meticulously executes compositions that characterize his ability to visually articulate a momentum – narrating the speed of waves and currents of seas, oceans, and rivers as he reflects on the lives he had lived near them.
Meanwhile, Lorenzana started his artistic practice working with illustration. He then went on to learn painting by studying some of the world’s most important artworks housed in major institutions. While his early works reflected socio-political aspects informed by his experience working at the Philippine Senate, his recent works tread more on formalist approaches in the deconstruction and construction of profiles through portraiture anchored in abstraction and pop surrealism.
