Allan Balisi's We Don’t Need No Fire to Warm Us @ Blanc Compound

WE DON’T NEED NO FIRE TO WARM US

Allan Balisi’s latest one man show, We Don’t Need Fire To Warm Us, is a departure of sorts, but not necessarily in the way you might think. Certainly, not in terms of method, which for Balisi involves a process of subtraction, of peeling away at the paint on the canvas, to reveal nuances in the underlayers. If anything, the method is even more severe this time.

But it’s the cohesive narrative threads that used to connect one work with the other that are gone, or at least not readily apparent. And while he still sifts through old photographs and fragments them as a sort of re-purposing and re-contextualizing , the cryptic and mysterious and thickly evocative imagery has subsumed the biographical
undercurrents that were once rampant and obvious.

The title We Don’t Need Fire To Warm Us is Balisi’s exhortation to deny the old dependencies, to uphold a kind of stand-alone existence, and his refusal to fall back on his old tropes seem to reflect this.

In many ways, he’s still going to the same places but he’s taking another route. Or several. Where he used to make up narratives through the connective tissues of biography, he is now making up narratives through the fragmentary disconnect of unrelated fictions. But then, you never really know. The story it ultimately tells is all up to you.

We Don’t Need No Fire to Warm Us is Allan Balisi’s fifth one man show and his third for Blanc. It will open on Saturday 6PM, September 19 at the blanc compound 359 Shaw Blvd., Mandaluyong City. For more information, please call or sms 752-0032 / 0920-9276436, email info@blanc.ph or visit www.blanc.ph, www.blancartspace.multiply.com.

We Don’t Need No Fire To Warm Us will run until October 9, 2009.