TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 185
30th November 2023
Dear friends and colleagues
On Tuesday after visiting Vargas Museum to meet with Buen Calubayan to discuss his show there and a future interview with him, and then Ateneo Art Gallery to see the Ateneo Art Awards (the 20th iteration of this important annual exhibition of young artists) I called in at Blanc Gallery to see an exhibition of paintings by Allan Balisi entitled Dog Years. Although I said something of his recent show at Silverlens in my last letter, I feel moved to write a few more notes about his work.
There is a painting from 1983 by Eric Fischl entitled Dog Days. “Dog Days” is a term from the Greeks for the hottest part of the summer. On the left of this twinned canvas painting a naked woman, returning from the beach, stares at two dogs who stare back at her, on the right a younger naked woman recoils as a teenage boy exposes himself, in the background a blue sea and a sun-bleached sky. In his early work Fischl played with transgression and stories of sexual awakening. There is nothing of this in Basili’s work but he does share a way of painting that looks relaxed and casual (Fischl refers to his way of painting as a sort of journalese derived from Manet) but which is deceptively precise.
It is good anyway to compare Balisi to someone other than Luc Tuymans. Tuymans work can be too heavy and sour with the bitter aftertastes of European history. I can’t imagine Balisi painting, as Tuymans did, the gas chamber in a Nazi deathcamp.
In the Blanc show there is a small painting of weeds before a pond that I especially like. A few weeds, a few stones, a few glints of sunshine in the water. It is enough to create a mood one remembers, languorously looking at a pond. A surprisingly complex but harmonious composition. The only thing not to like is the title Accumulation of Gestures II (Pond/Ponding) which seems unnecessary long and prescriptive. Pond would have been sufficient.
Wistful, yes; melancholic, perhaps; elegiac even?
Distillation is key.
A larger painting of a fairground big wheel, nothing unnecessary or extraneous. As in a Rodchenko photograph it is seen vertiginously from underneath, all its mechanisms as clear as in a diagram or an Albert Renger-Patzsch photograph from his book Das Welt ist schön – The world is beautiful. The painting’s title again seems too long and prescriptive: Behind you, steady breaths. There is already enough poetry in the painting: it doesn’t need more. I feel the titles should be as distilled and laconic as the work.
As with a haiku with only 17 syllables, each element must be carefully chosen and precisely placed. Or one could think of W.C. Williams at his most terse, as with his red wheel barrow
so much depends
upon…
Distillation is key.
Look at any painting of Balisi’s: not all the colours are there; not all the objects are there. Those deductions give a sense of strangeness to what is otherwise typical or mundane.
There are pictures of hands touching things or other hands. Perhaps, seeing is not enough. Perhaps we need to touch or even grasp things to know them.
He makes small paintings that are considered but achieved without laboured stiffness. That is strangely rare today. There are big paintings that work here too. A painting of leaves seen at night, by photo flash perhaps?
Blanc is a curious space: a big cube cut up into four smaller boxes: it works best when, as here, hung sparsely.
I don’t know what “dog years” means as a title. Is it something to do with a year in a dog’s life being equivalent to seven of a human’s?
I don’t know how long each painting takes: it could be hours or days or weeks. It doesn’t really matter – what matters is how long he took to learn to paint like this: five years ago, his paintings were good, but not this good.
Probably, as with Tuymans, seeing a few paintings by him at one time is enough – one glass of muscat is always enough.
Both Balisi and his partner Dina Gadia have works in the Portrait show at Mo Space, an exhibition I will report on next week or the week after. One could say, tongue in cheek, that whereas Balisi aspires to the enigmatic smile of the Giaconda, Gadia aspires to the enigmatic smile of the Cheshire cat
“What does it mean?” is the wrong question to ask of these paintings. “What does it evoke?” would be better. Faded but still poignant memories. Memories that seem very specific but somehow work out as shared, generic even.
And, above all, there is the pleasure of looking at something that is just beautifully painted – like watching a dancer dancing with poise, lost in the rhythms of his or her body. Sometimes that is enough.
As always, have a good week
Tony
PS. I may write something of the Ateneo art awards when the catalogue for it is printed.