AMBIGUOUS: 14 Latest Works by Tony Perez

June 23 - 30, 2023

Gallery 928 4th Floor, Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Mandaluyong City and Gallery 928

AYSN Building, 3rd Floor, P. Tuazon Boulevard corner C. Benitez Street, Cubao, Quezon City

The Narrative:

The narrative of this exhibit is comprised of 14 different renditions of night.

The prologue piece is _Portrait of Joel Cruz as The Magician_, setting the tone for the exhibit and heralding the succession of 14 paintings that follow. The Prologue Painting is the one painting that contains all of the techniques employed in the body of works that comprise the exhibit: measurements and composition, brushwork, light-and-shadowing, color sense, use of contrast and double-entendres, and the utilization of at least four shades of color in a single work.

The first painting is _That Evening, in the Professor's Study_, a simulated panel from _The Spirit Questors Komiks_. In his dialogue bubble the professor announces the secret to traveling between enchanted trees via astral railways, like those of elevated trains. One such railway is in the next painting, _Night Ocean (Diptych)_, hovering over land and the sea of the Unconscious. This motif of the railway continues in _Night Train Passing Through_, where a young man in his bedroom is about to drift off to sleep after a hard massage. Meanwhile, in the district, a man trudges up a street in _Night Shift_. In _Night Classes_ we see various night shifts already at work within a cluster of buildings.  _Sleepwalker_ follows, in which a boy climbs a ladder presumably to go over a stone fence. In _The Caretaker's Child_, the little girl is not sleepwalking but likewise dreams. 

The second part of the exhibit takes the viewer into actual dream states, beginning with the artist's _Self-Portrait as Gorgon_, which serves as the transition painting from the first part. _Kumanthong Cabinet_ shows us a boy spirit come to life from its statuette, stepping out into the interior of the house where he is enshrined, and then, in _Constellations_, he goes outside the house and looks at the stars in the night sky. Dream slides into fantasy in the deconstructed female figure in _Rain_ and  in the Philippine myth of _Bernardo Carpio_, who is suspended in eternity preventing two mountains from colliding with each other. And then there is _The Copse_, where a man sits beside a bonfire under the trees. The final piece is _The Builders_. In this, fourteenth, piece the viewer can assume that some of the men in the previous paintings are taking a brandy break from a day of construction work in Cubao.