Thursday, April 5, 2018

UMBRA + PENUMBRA


Kaida Contemporary presents Pinggot Zulueta's recent works in Umbra+Penumbra this Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 6PM. Zulueta plays on the familiar and the nostalgic as he presents monochromatic abstractions of mixed media, woodworks and assemblages. Found objects from his childhood countryside home make their way into his pieces, creating works that are partly autobiographical while touching on themes of attachment and abandonment, contrasting innocence with maturity, belongingness with alienation. Umbra+Penumbra is on show until May 25. Please come visit!

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UMBRA + PENUMBRA

For his first solo show this year, visual artist Pinggot Zulueta gives light, or rather, casts a shadow to the obscurities of his life through “Umbra+Penumbra.” Umbra is the Latin word for “shadow,” which is also the term used to describe the innermost part of it, a place of total darkness. The Penumbra, on the other hand, is the region in which only a portion of light is stained by an occluding body. But the body in the umbra is also within the penumbra.

“Umbra+Penumbra” is, in a way, Zulueta’s stygian look back to when he dreamed and came of age. In the exhibition, he takes us back to his childhood home in the countryside, where he often spent afternoons in the middle of crop fields and farmhouses, and nights musing in his room, calling for the moon as his solitary companion. 

Evident in the mixed media assemblages included in the collection, is Zulueta’s masterful utilization of found objects he deems familiar. The abstract sculptures are dressed with relics from both his childhood and adulthood such as wooden figures, tattered cartons, miniature toy soldiers, ropes, an umbrella, a typewriter, newspapers, and antiquated books. The inclusion of these objects make the works even closer to him and much more autobiographical.

Zulueta plays on nostalgia, the familiar, and the past to cast a shadow on the crushing adversaries, which he experiences in his day-to-day life. 

Summer Night Bloom, Mixed media Assemblage,18x24in, 2018

Unlike his recent shows in which he unleashed his sentiments in a cascading downpour, “Umbra+Penumbra” highlights the obscurities of his emotions spiritedly. According to him, this is his way of playing as a child again, carelessly tarnishing the sharp white background, reuniting himself with his toys and youthful soul. And like an eclipse, the two shadows, Umbra and Penumbra, silently dance within these monochromatic abstractions. 

With mixed media wood works and assemblages capitalizing on old discarded and found objects, Zulueta flirts on themes of attachment and abandonment, contrasting innocence with maturity, belongingness and alienation—“Umbra+Penumbra” is fueled with contradictions. 

All of these done by playfully creating tension between black, white, and gray
“I just want to play with shapes and forms, a way to escape from serious topics,” he says. 

“Through the abstract form, I channel my focus in trying to unearth and interpret my personal experiences and perspectives, which are buried deep within me.”

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'Pinggot' goes back to childhood

Text by Lester Babiera
Phil Daily Inquirer

Jose 'Pinggot' Vinluan Zulueta has been moving constantly these past few years. The photojournalist-artist has been mainly based in Manila, but he has been across the region-from Australia to New Zealand and Cambodia. But he has always tried to moor his photojournalism and art in the Philippines.

In his latest solo exhibit at Kaida Contemporary titled 'Umbra+Penumbra,' Zulueta tries to merge his photojournalism and artistic practice. Perhaps drawing from black-and white photography he paints polychrome mixed-media works consisting of relics of the past.

'In this exhibition, I am trying to reconnect my childhood by going back to my hometown and create memories by piercing together relics of the past through art,' Zulueta said.

Pinggot reminisces his coming-of-age years living in Tarlac. Back then, everything was not yet complicated, he wistfully says. He recalls an easy life in Paniqui playing with whatever simple things he finds at home or in his neighborhood. It was a bucolic existence, he says. He was at peace with nature.

As a result his latest mixed-media paintings are culled not exactly from found objects but from vestiges of the past. The artist explains he went back to his ancestral home and neighborhood and gathered from there remnants of his childhood and incorporated them in his art.

For example, 'Starry Night' collects his toy guitar, an old hanger, and even discarded wood in his house painted in different shades of gray. Gray presumably dovetails with the 'Umbra and Penumbra' of the title since the two distinct parts of the shadow almost always have only two colors, black and white, or a gradated merging of the these.

The pieces as a result reek of nostalgia. 'Summer Night Bloom,' a work that shows a bouquet of fake roses placed beside a withered palaspas (Palm Sunday frond), reminds one of those tacky decorations in the provinces and of Holy Week during summer break.

Zulueta is known for his abstractions. But he literally goes representational and figurative in his latest series, and since he's tackling something very close to his heart, his works in the new series are personal and nostalgic.