‘Strolling Home’ at Vetted: Walking is good for the art
While still a painting major at the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts, Vien Valencia could not afford the materials required for his projects. So he scoured junk yards, and picked up objects from his surroundings, including those he found while walking home to Marikina from UP whenever he didn’t have money for his fare.
Walking home wasn’t only good for his heart. It was good for his art.
For his show “Strolling Home” at Vetted, whose exhibits are vetted by no less than Jonathan Matti, Vien made use of the jute sacks that he had collected through the years in his various “walks.” They bear markings of their origin, mostly from foreign lands, alluding to the nomadic concept. The title “Strolling Home” also is symbolic of Valencia’s return to painting, as he revisits not just the method but also the mood and experiences of his student days in UP and the days he occasionally strolled home from school.
We are all informed by the meanderings of our lives, whether we stop to smell the flowers or collect jute sacks along the way.
Those walks from UP to Marikina, not a short walk, mind you, inform Vien’s paintings
. They evoke the visual language of the streets — the houses patched up with whatever materials their owners could gather, peeling paint that reveal the many layers beneath, surfaces weathered through storms and the blazing sun. He assumes a critical gaze, stripping his visuals of the gaiety provided by color, using just a stark palette of white and black instead. His strokes carry memories from those strolls along with the emotions they conjure.
“His abstraction has a lot of depth and meaning,” says Jonathan.
Vien used to be a teacher.
Before receiving the 2023 Ateneo Art Awards, Vien kept a relatively low profile in the gallery circuit. According to him, he didn’t have the funds to mount a show because he had devoted much of his time as a volunteer art teacher to children in both urban and rural areas.
He then launched his own community-based initiative, Nomad Projects, because he thought of expanding the communities’ involvement in the art-making process.
“Eventually, I reinvented the idea of outreach into a collaboration with community participants who don’t follow instructions. Kasama sila as directors ng final output,” Vien explains.
His outreach work exposed him to the complex realities of various communities, such as the Badjaos that he encountered in Manila, which led him to explore the idea of the nomadic existence. He could relate to this, having experienced countless moves from one house to another due to his parents’ unstable finances. Vien also became concerned with notions of space and its boundaries, and how it is manipulated. He was alarmed by the precarious existence of communities who’ve been, or are about to be, displaced by developments.
Vien’s most recent outputs illuminate those realities, expressed in a span of mediums. Nomad Project’s untitled installation (Bad Land) shown at Underground Gallery is a multi-channel video work with footage taken of the Badjaos. Old wooden paddles are the central focus in his West Gallery show titled “Totems.” They speak of the displaced fisherfolk of Bulacan whose paddles exemplify new meanings, as tools of the trade that have become artifacts of a past life lost to the reclamation of Bulacan’s coastal grounds.
He worked with the Dumagat-Remontado indigenous people living by the Tinapak River in Taytay, Rizal for “Imprint of an imprint of an imprint,” which was exhibited in Singapore this year. Vien, together with the community, documented the terrain of the river through a technique called frottage, wherein a coloring material is rubbed on fabrics stretched over rock formations, in effect mapping the ancient striations that have formed naturally.
How about you? When you stroll home, what do you see? *
(“Strolling Home” is on view at Vetted, Unit 126, Milelong Building, Amorsolo St., Makati City, until Oct. 25, Monday to Friday.