A shape-shifting collab gels on canvas
You might seek some hidden meaning in the title of a joint Luis Lorenzana and Clarence Chun exhibit, “CC x LL,” which adds up to “300” in Roman numerals or factors out to “20,000.” You’d be barking up the wrong tree. “CC x LL” is simply a pure collaboration between two Filipino artists who are still exploring expression in new and abstract forms. Cryptic numerals be damned.
The two artists are game and friendly, chatting with family and friends at MONO8 for the evening launch, as gallery director and show curator Gwen Bautista guides us through the work.
The thing is, both artists have skewed their styles recently, shedding most traces of representational work and moving towards the abstract; in the three collaborative pieces shown at “CC x LL,” it’s a winning combination.
“I decided these two artists should collaborate and work together, because they complement each other’s work,” says Bautista. “They both want to break away from what they know. What really ties them together is to reclaim themselves from what they’ve learned, to reclaim painting as their own.”
They come from very different backgrounds—Lorenzana is self-trained, a public administration graduate who worked in the Senate for a time before turning his perusal of the faces there in the gallery into vivid portraits that mix Filipino elements, pop surrealism, political satire and an Old Masters’ palette. This was a period where Luis was getting noticed for group shows in the US, featured in write-ups in The Washington Post, amongst others, when he was apt to decorate his portraits in pastoral or historical settings with cartoon-like faces: young misses with disarming gazes, decorated in punk makeup or with lollipops stuck in their mouths, or clutching a small creature called Bluefallo. Their classical wooden frames were also often decorated with “Aladdin Sane”-era Bowie makeup slashes.
Astoundingly, Lorenzana took this highly sellable style and chucked it completely, moving into the “Heads” series at Silverlens two years back, abstracting those portraits down to wooden-looking rectangles with minimalized (though no less expressive) gazes and radio-wavy lines for mouths. A radical shift.
Chun, meanwhile, studied painting at Yale University School of Art and did his master’s at the School of Visual Arts in New York. But he wanted something else, something closer to the idea of movement and shifting time that he associates with growing up around oceans (Tacloban, Hawaii). The back room of MONO8 features past works by both artists leading up to their collab, and one of Chun’s is a self-portrait: it shows a very abstract deconstruction of a dragon figure against gold Chinese patterns, bisected by floating cigarettes, slicing their way through the central figure. There’s a horizontal movement here, as though planes are shifting on the canvas, in a linear path through space and time. “It’s very much like the movement of seeing the waves,” notes Bautista.
All of this birthed a new synthesis when Bautista put them together. Chun had the first go, doing the background: “I made it hard for him,” he laughs. “What I wanted was just to give him a setting, like, put ourselves in a room, or a certain place, like a book, a place... I just wanted him to react to the work.” Lorenzana admits, “I had a hard time reacting to it, and he was telling me, ‘You can tell the story if you want.’ After that I asked Clarence to do the finishing.”
In each of the three, what look like reimagined Francis Bacon room spaces with architectural passages are overlaid with Lorenzana’s “heads” of various depth and size, like floating ghosts with gazes addressing the viewer intimately. Chun then took back the work (“I was surprised he consciously left me spaces to work over again”) and added bursts of action, color-loaded lines suggestive of Ralph Steadman or, indeed, Bacon’s glimpses of motion.
It all gels quite naturally.
The risk, for two artists known for a certain style, was to find new ways to address old concerns. Lorenzana was visiting the US, after his work got attention there, and he got absorbed in the work of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and others. “So when I got back, I was questioning what I was doing. I cancelled every show.” The next two years were about “the challenge of doing something flat.” It was a bit of a struggle: “My visual eye automatically converts everything into shadow and thinking of depth. But eventually I got it 50 percent flat, and it morphed, evolved into these heads—the simplest image I could make.”
For Chun, trained in art school to jettison narrative, coming back to Manila after chilling out in Hawaii was a shock. “I came for my first show and realized that Manila had gotten faster, louder—and that’s where the fast strokes come from. My work is always about speed, but the current works I had from Hawaii were too slow, so I had to take that volume up. There’s a certain rhythm here: it’s just everywhere, in every direction, more interaction. The work changed.”
A lot gets jettisoned when you go abstract: narrative, depth of field, sometimes form. But what’s left, in the combined spaces of these two artists, is worth the shape-shifting.
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“CCxLL” runs at MONO8, BLK 113, 53 Connecticut St., Greenhills, San Juan until Nov. 24. As MONO8 does, a special zine was created for the show, written by London-based critic Marv Recinto.
