Malady

11 Mar - 01 Apr 2017

Mike Adrao

Against a dark backdrop whose gentle folds and smooth creases help evoke a flag undulating at a glacial place or a cloth hastily laid out on a flat surface, stand human figures whose faces, limbs, and torsos inexplicably morph into heterogeneous topographies of bone, fur, shell, stone, and minerals. The vertical stratification of skin is made obsolete; dense thickets and ossified formations of various elements clash, fuse, and intertwine to constitute the human body, its inner recesses remain uncharted.

In Malady, Mike Adrao’s fourth solo exhibition, these grotesque apparitions are rendered primarily using charcoal. This further lends a haunting quality to the depiction of humans in viscerally jarring states; figures mangled and marred by animal skulls, voluminous thorns, dendrites, anemone, cobwebs, tendrils, foam, oceanic waves, geologic structures, reptilian skin, spores, roots, and branches.

These bodies, colonized by labyrinthine networks and calcified clusters, circumscribed merely by human outlines, are simultaneously dense and porous. Within said boundaries lies a vast range of values and textures, occasionally ambiguous in terms of its visual-haptic quality—a particular area might seem to feel either like froth, smoke, a marine sponge, or all at the same time.

By virtue of sharing territory, human and miscellanea are locked together, consequently connecting the symbolic potentials of each. Each work operates as both metaphor and metamorphosis, and despite the negative connotations of “malady” as a term, the ambiguity permeating the images nullifies prejudices that such depictions are desecrations of the human form. A tension emanates from the multiplicities and paradoxes embodied by the figures: the plurality of textures and properties; the irrelevance of reason, logic, and sequence; the synthesis of internal and external. The chaotic and disorganized overthrows the lucid and systematic, paving the way for multiple meanings and interpretations as opposed to a singular verdict.

Just as rocks and flora might suggest fortitude and vivacity, it too can signify cruelty and frailty. Such is the complexity of personality conveyed in Adrao’s drawings—aside from examining how identity is constructed by both self and others, the artist likewise probes into the consequences of our actions and how we govern ourselves, our adherence to or eschewing of social conventions, our dead-end obsession over profit accumulation, our desensitization amidst a torrential influx of information, our corruption, transcendence, or both.

Mike Adrao had his first solo exhibition and residency at Project Space Pilipinas in 2009. In 2012, he had his solo exhibition Decoy, Decay at Tin-aw Art Gallery. He has been a part of group exhibitions in Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia and the special exhibitions section of Southeast Asia Platform at Art Stage Singapore (2014) and the Karen H. Montinola Selection at Art Fair Philippines (2015). He was part of the exhibition Complicated at the Lopez Museum and Library in 2015 and Paper Trails: Southeast Asian Works on Paper at Sangkring Art Space, Jogjakarta, Indonesia.

Malady runs from 11 March 2017 to 1 April 2017 at the Tin-aw Art Gallery.

Drawn Out

Leo Abaya

Drawing is immediate and direct. It is intimate but it can monumentalize. It constitutes among the first manifestations of the visualized idea - as it were - drawn out from the imagination of the artist. It is not an accident that the word draw, also means to pull out, to extract, to gather, or to conclude something. It also means stalemate and seduction. It is as homonymous as its place in the history of visual arts across many cultures as a primary or secondary practice, autonomous or instrumental, preparatory or final, measured or expressive; its plurality of meaning may arguably be a quintessential metaphor of art making in the contemporary setting.

Gone is the time when photography rendered drawing redundant as a way to depict the external and internal world. Conceptual art had used it as a tool to question the nature of representation and modernity, which, with drawing’s intimate connection to the archaic past, made the latter appear even more remote and irrelevant to contemporary art and life. But drawing has come of age, and its links with narrative and associations with the literary have been powerful engines for its return. Its time has (indeed) arrived because it offers the artist the freedom, as an under-regarded and undertheorized backwater to explore hitherto overlooked or repressed aspects of creativity. (Dexter, 2006).

Drawing is Mike Adrao’s primary medium. After years of practice as an illustrator he pursued a full time practice beyond the confines of the publishing desk, into the world populated by characters in scenarios that play out the latest plot brewing in society and its institutions.

As a running strategy for his kind of iconography, Adrao anthropomorphizes abundance, amalgamated in motifs and forms found in nature and material culture. In his works, the human form is a cornucopia encroached by its contents, alluding to a breakdown of humanity; a kind of visual putrefaction in the guise of an ornate accumulation of what is all at once botanical, scatological, and anatomical. We see innards, skeletons, animal and human crania, musculature, marine encrustations, arterial patterns, and maze-like tracery that appear like callado embroidery and trapunto if they were worked on fabric.

These drawings are figure-ground oscillations orchestrated in a wide range of values made possible by the loose carbon molecules of charcoal that lend well to draughtsmanly manipulation. The build-up process of the medium extracts deceptively simple compositions over extended periods of time, which strain the arms, the neck of those engaged in fine, painstakingly intricate work. The works do not let the eyes rest, and yet, in their achromatic starkness, there is a calming cohesion, even reflectiveness.

At a glance, the imagery reveals its links to the bizarre paintings of the Milanese artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), who used fruits, vegetables, tree roots, vines and other curious objects as building blocks to create portraits. Rediscovered by Salvador Dali, this sensibility towards the representation of the human figure to underscore a metaphor or propose a symbolism continues to fascinate artists through the years. Moreover, the draughtsmanship of the much older István Orosz, Sandro Del Prete, and Jan Švankmajer are contiguous with Adrao who professes his admiration for the drawings of Elmer Borlongan and the works of Roberto Feleo.

Alluding to the formats of portraiture, the works draw out the symbolic use and abuse of wealth by the powerful in society trapped by greed. They are visualizations of the human condition, afflicted with a malaise represented by the perverse application of baroque and rocaille motifs exhuming ghosts of the colonial past.

The uncanny absence and presence of sitters liken the ambiguous portraits of Adrao to an abandoned temple that has been swallowed back by a forest it once decimated in order for it to be built. Not so unlike the eponymous hero in Oscar Wilde’s novel, the works are among the many Dorian Gray portraits depicting the affliction of the times.

Laca/8Mar2017

Work Cited: Emma Dexter, Introduction. Vitamin D, London: Phaidon Press, 2006.