Crucible Gallery

Hope you can come…

The Crucible’s @ the Xavier Art Fest until Sunday. See you!!!

The Crucible Gallery will be at the 6th Floor Booth 30. We are featuring artist Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. See you at the fair!!!

PNEUMATIC SYNERGETIC

SOMATOSONIC is art unit composed of Christina Dy, Tad Ermitano, and Marco Ortiga that was formed because of the members’ propensity to collectively transform and improve ideas brought up in conversation.

The works in the exhibition are based on ideas and preliminary work generated during an independent residency in Calatagan, in the compound of Mr Patrick Reyes. The residency was organized with a view of isolating the group to encourage its communal chemistry.

The word “Synergy” in the title denotes multiple actors producing a combined effect greater than the sum of their individual actions. “Pneumatic” comes from the Greek word originally meaning “breath”, and refers to Calatagan’s local winds, which drove and inspired nearly all of the works.

Hinangin (Filipino for “Acted upon by the wind”) is the group’s take on the Aeolian harp, first described by Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century. Winds passing over the strings produce singing tones reminiscent of electroacoustic audio feedback. The electrical Hingangin de Balani mimics the tones but not the physics of the Hinangin, using magnets (“batubalani” in Filipino) and a microcontroller to create a kind of shifting magnetic wind to excite metal strings. Tetrix Kite is a kite based on the tetrix, the tetrahedral version of Waclaw Sierpinski’s fractal triangle. Sumbahan 1 is a composition based on the groups’s version of the sumba, the indigenous buzzer attached to guryon, Filipino kites. Kinograms (“motion writing”) were originally called “light paintings”, and were conceived as a response to the locale’s spectacular sunsets.

PANDY AVIADO “WABI SABI” - a world view centered on transience and imperfection.

"Wabi-Sabi" beckons viewers to contemplate the inherent transience of all things, emphasizing that nothing is permanent, yet everything carries a unique and undeniable charm. The deliberate inclusion of imperfections in the artworks encourages the audience to find beauty in the impermanent and imperfect aspects of their own lives, fostering a sense of acceptance and appreciation for the present moment.

Pandy Aviado is Virgilio “Pandy” Aviado (b. 1944) is one of the Philippines’ leading visual artists and renowned figure of fine printmaking.

Happening today

Dante Palmes’s "Omnibus Hues" at The Crucible Gallery

By Cid Reyes

Process Art is the term that best describes the recent works of Dante Palmes in his current exhibition, "Omnibus Hues," now on view at The Crucible Gallery. It refers to "the process of its making, which is not hidden but remains a permanent aspect of the completed work." One might say that Palmes’s focus is on the manner in which his work is created. It’s about the journey, not the destination.

Several factors come into play in the ex*****on of the artist’s work. The distribution of paint into designated places, the choice of hues that will mingle with each other, the quantity and density of pigment that will engulf the canvas, the weight of pressure applied on the fluid paint—all these, obedient to the decision of Palmes, are participative in the act of creation.

The result is a surprising coagulation of material and forces that may either resolve into an abysmal mess and chaos or an impactful and delightful apparition that has condensed into one coherent unity of a painting. But like a magician pulling out colorful kerchiefs and hopping rabbits from a bowler hat, Palmes has pulled out, not pieces of cloth or long-eared mammals, but the evocative and imaginary flight of birds, with their gleaming, freshly preened feathers. At least, that was the instant reaction of an audience with a natural tendency to seek the reference of abstract work analogous to visible reality.

Orchestrating a severe palette of blacks and whites, browns, siennas, and chrome yellows, Dante Palmes, with finesse and confidence, summons, by design or accident, the exhilaration of discovering the route of his painterly journey.

https://tribune.net.ph/2023/07/29/katya-angara-creating-artful-life/

Katya Angara: Creating the artful life - Daily Tribune The first time I met Katya Angara, third of the children of the late Senator Edgardo Angara and his wife,

Congratulations Katya Angara for a great and blockbuster opening of your new show.

More info:
http://agimat.net/dendro-philia/

Katya Angara’s “DENDROPHILIA” launched yesterday at The Crucible Gallery in SM Megamall Mandaluyong City

To confront the power of nature is to confront ourselves. In her solo exhibit “Dendrophilia”, dark artist Katya Angara shatters the walls of the Freudian ego and conscious self by taking us beyond the boundaries of understanding and into revelatory dreams of unconscious desire.

Slipping into her Plant Diwata alter ego, Angara commits herself to new ways of connecting to the natural world as a dendrophile, a lover of plants. Plants speak in unseen ways, and feed off our emotions and energies. Her material explorations emulate plants in their natural habitats, how they react to human touch, voices and music, how they form symbiosis or conflict with us and other forms of life.

Her chosen materials of paper, pencils and charcoal are a symbolic homage to the natural cycles of life. Plants are transformed into paper which humans use for art and writing; in turn, she provides a second life to these materials, honouring their ancient providence using paper art as a conduit to reflect on themes of catharsis, symbiosis, transience, and transcendence, alongside careful scientific observation of the physical forms and social behaviours of plants.

When the Plant Diwata withdraws, she is subsumed by Angara’s second alter ego, Blonde Ninja Vampire, who takes over in gleeful do******ix fashion. Using the language of flowers, this vampire manipulates shards of flower drawings into violent forms that float and drift in absurdity and futility. But then we are awakened to the visceral pleasure of small things: the chiaroscuro of light and shadow, of how one paper fractal transforms the other like a mirror reflecting infinite versions of itself. Whilst her pencil and charcoal illustrations may seem nihilistic, they speak deeply of the artist’s acceptance of the human condition as driven both by evolutionary biology and self- determination. The entire universe is born time and again in every single flower.

Mykie Concepcion
NEW ROADS
11-23 July 2023

The Crucible invites you to another exhibit on Tuesday, July 11…see you!

“Intimations on a Summer’s Day” by Bettina Silverio

On going at The Crucible “Intimations on a Summer’s Day” by Bettina Silverio