Uncertainty: an art show by Lirio Salvador, Eugene Jarque, Mac Valdezco and Jonathan Castro

Uncertainty. Not the kind that makes you toss in your bed and lose sleep, but the sort that challenges the very core of your being, the sort that transforms your life from being routine to unpredictable and inspiring. These four individuals dare to defy the sacred covenants of conventional art by utilizing mundane and unlikely objects in their works as well as refusing to do what the rest of the world tells them to do: plan ahead.

Lirio Salvador is a Fine Arts graduate in the Technological University of the Philippines. He
founded a band called Elemento, a multi-dimensional art group which specializes in sound art. Sound art involves no scales, but focuses on sound textures and uses noise to its advantage. Salvador creates his own instruments using everyday materials such as bicycle gears, drain cleaning springs and stainless steel tubes. His works look like objects fresh from a science fiction movie, but with more symmetry and a beauty that is quite unexpected of gears, springs and
tubes.

Eugene Jarque has certain similarities with Salvador---he also graduated from TUP with a Fine Arts degree and he also uses metal (in the form of aluminum sheets) in his art. The similarities, however, end there. Jarque also incorporates receipts, magazine clippings, soil, enamel, gesso, sandpaper and ferric chloride in his creations. The dominant color in his works is gray; witnessing his paintings, one is delightfully surprised that there are so many shades of a color usually considered drab and uninteresting.No wonder Jarque was presented with the Cultural Center of the Philippines' prestigious Thirteen Artists Award, which is given only to progressive young artists with integrity, coherence of ideas, consistence and sensitivity to today's social realities every three years.

Another recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award is Mac Valdezco, an Advertising graduate also from TUP. Using strips of paper, cotton strings, cotton tape, shoelaces and cotton rags, she creates biomorphicfigures that are sometimes whimsical and sometimes loud, but one thing is for sure: they are never the same from first glance. Her art metamorphoses before our very eyes and the beauty of it is that we can never catch how and just what it has become.

Another TUP Fine Arts graduate is Jonathan Castro. As a painter, he explores the interweaving of texture, color and tonal patterns through non-traditional painting techniques and materials. He usually presents a series of works that expresses the ambiance of free play and interaction of shapes and lines to convey a range of emotions.

There you have it---we have four artists telling us that uncertainty is not a bad thing. The beauty of their art proves this to be true.

Uncertainity will open on Monday, March 3, 2008 at 6pm. Blanc is located at 2E Crown Tower 107 H.V. dela Costa St. Salcedo Village, Makati City. For more information please visit www.blanc.ph or www.blancartspace. multiply. com call or sms 752-0032/0920- 9276436