Shoko Mafune & Mark Valenzuela: Of Reminiscences
Pseudoscience suggests that curious minds often converge on the same idea. It’s as if two persons independent from one another, two strangers finally catch the same train and embark on a singular journey towards discovery. They may or may not physically meet but their ideas and thoughts float and kiss in the air, generating a powerful synergy meant to satisfy some designated need—the need to bring order in things, the need to achieve a common goal, or for artists, the relentless need to purge and to express.
This seems to be the case in the side-by-side solo exhibitions of Japanese ceramic artist Shoko Mafune and Filipino terra-cotta sculptor Mark Valenzuela in the Galleria Duemila. Both accomplished sculptors, Mafune and Valenzuela take on memories, reminiscences, absence, and nostalgia as central subjects in their shows. But despite engaging in the same intuitive direction concept-wise, the artists have undoubtedly interpreted and represented such concepts idiosyncratically—in aesthetic sensibilities and stylistic leanings of their own.
Titled “Has it stopped raining?”, Mafune’s show is a beautiful plethora of quiet and delicate sculptural-cum-functional pieces that are evocative of the feminine spirit and its potent passages. Seeing Mafune’s stoneware works and touching and feeling them bring forth almost all at once sentiments of ache, love, longing, and hopeful beginnings to the viewer. Tranquil yet intoxicating, Mafune’s two dozen highly - stylized pieces seemingly draw an artfully portrait of a woman and a lover whose heart is in a perpetual journey “of looking for somewhere snug outside of my world, [of] coming and going between isolation and an uncomfortable place.”
Mafune’s show takes its name from the artist’s piece, an elegant bust of a woman with her hair adrift in the wind whose mystifying eyes appears to be following the viewer even when the viewer has deliberately looked away. The woman’s questioning eyes, it seems, have been, by design, fashioned the way a meticulous critic studies and surveys a painting for the very first time—at one point forgiving and at the other, contemptuous.
Eye-catching pieces from Mafune’s two-dozen stoneware exhibit, some of which have just been shown in the gallery for the first time, include “Mysterious Tears” (a sculpture of a woman’s face crafted as a lid of a bowl that shows her with a single tear dropping off her closed eye and several other pieces of small heads ensconced in the woman’s skull fashioned as a bowl), “Lost in the Dark” (a naked woman with a melancholic expression on her face sitting on a swing, as if in Roland Barthes’s words “waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign…”), “Rendez-vous” (a glazed bust of a woman whose hand is gently touching her chest and caressing her heart), ‘Egg’s Kiss’ (two huge eggs caught up in a sweet kiss), and “The Place for Waiting” (a sculpture of an androgynous head lying atop a base, motionless in his or her desire for the absent being).
According to Mafune, all her works are handmade and fired at 1,200 degrees centigrade. Some of them, she admits, took her years to perfect. Born in 1955, Mafune has been doing ceramic art since the ‘80s. She has studied pottery for two years in Seto, Japan under two traditional ceramic masters before leaving for Spain and other European countries to do some research about sculpture and ceramics. She has stayed in the Philippines for a decade, but is now based in Australia where she has decided to maintain a studio and teach pottery.
Truth be told, Mafune’s pieces embodies this paradoxical journey, one that is driven by what is present and absent, by what is real and dreamlike. She says, “The place I am looking for might be an illusion. When I am working with clay, I am floating in a fantasy. It must be a snuggery place for me.”
While Mafune’s works deal with quixotic and nostalgic journeys, Valenzuela’s pieces attempt to depict memories and reminiscences, at least fragments of them. Aptly titled “Excerpts from a not too distant past”, Valenzuela’s show presents terra-cotta sculptures-slash-installation works paired with wood and metal that retrace and map out the artist’s memories. Valenzuela, however, opted to show these memories in a very bare and minimal manner, choosing to present his images and ideas in constructs, in random deconstructed pieces as opposed to total wholes.
Valenzuela says that he deliberately molded his works that way so as to “lead the viewer’s imagination,” making his or her “fill the gaps and create a whole image from the deconstructed excerpts.” In this manner, the artist indirectly and subtly compels his audience to “piece together the fragments of a quickly fading dream.” Here, the viewers are given freedom (albeit out of the witty machinations of the artist) to continue the narrative and imagery they have been provided with and to presumably close the gap between the past (where the memories have been first conceived) and the present (where the conceived memories are remembered and recalled).
Works from the show also represent the fragmented nature of memory, such as how “we don’t remember our past as a continuous narrative, nor the fullness of each experience as it was lived” or how “our memories are the strange and scattered snapshots that we have consciously or unconsciously chosen to hold on to.” In so doing, the artist has managed to create a sense of absence that persists—a tension of memory; “a sense of loss for what is there and cannot be remembered.”
Notable pieces in Valenzuela’s recent collection include toy-like planes installed at different heights of the gallery’s walls, a man and a woman locked in a coerced embrace, a dismembered arm and leg, terra-cotta sculptures of five heads with punctured holes that serve as mouthpieces for transistor radios (playing different channels) placed inside each head, and terra-cotta installations of countless ears on a wood panel and a head giving birth to two other heads, to name a few.
By depicting only fragments of the whole image or idea, Valenzuela, thus, avoids “exaggeration” or “dramatization” in his work, making his pieces almost clinical and without a tinge of wistfulness and “showing only that which is real to him.”
A Dumaguete-based artist and an alumnus of Silliman University, Valenzuela has had several exhibitions in Manila, Cebu, and in his hometown since 2002. He was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards in 2007 and was a recipient of the Sinugdunan grant from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
The Shoko Mafune and Mark Valenzuela shows are on view until April 17 at the Galleria Duemila, 210 Loring Street, Pasay City. For more information, call 831-9990 or visit www.galleriaduemila.com. - Article courtesy of Manila Bulletin
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
