On Going: Mark Andy Garcia & Neil Pasilan @ Artinformal
Mark Andy Garcia and Neil Pasilan are imagining a brief moment of somnambulism. Tulog na, sumasagot pa. Eyes closed, a figure half-hears sounds, then mumbles, babbles words as an automatic response.
The exhibition unites two painters whose intuitive approach to material gives their images the sketch-like quality of a reverie. Hardly based on external reference material, these images contain the peace and the fever of the half-seen, half-known, half-dreamed.
Pasilan’s spontaneous mark-making, made by brush and by striking the surface with the soft branch of a plant, thrums with primal urgency. His figures, at times crudely scrawled, recall naïve painting or art brut, wherein the untrained hand suggests the archetype of the unrestrained mind. As a self-taught painter, Pasilan in his previous exhibitions mined this outsider’s language to arrange a visual code for the countryside, the barrio. Here, sun-flecked greens evoke a natural sprawl. They mark spaces of seclusion—where a girl is deep in prayer, and lovers drift in the water by a burning light—or a wilderness dotted with symbols, icons, or silhouettes. Images hover like shadow worlds revealed by the light of a candle, but their textural immediacy lends them patina, a property of the time-worn.
Garcia’s paintings are without human presence, but one imagines movement in the way he varies color: light frolicking on a still lake, time drooping idly on the tips of wilting petals. Garcia is interested in how color may unravel emotional content or open up paths to the immaterial, whether psyche or spirituality. Aspects of his open-air scenes, a cherished motif of Impressionists, and his single still-life painting are conspicuous nods to the works of modern painters: Picasso’s blue period and the sunflowers of Van Gogh. Through scenes imagined, Garcia proceeds to re-orient the thought behind a familiar trope or color, so that blue may signify a shade of emotion beyond melancholy, perhaps something closer to a healing faith or its joyous weathers.
- PDL
Tulog na, Sumasagot pa. opens on August 13, 2025
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with fellow artist Neil Pasilan at Artinformal Gallery |