Tatong Recheta Torres' "Dominion" at Hiraya Gallery

Hiraya Gallery presents the solo exhibiton of upcoming 27 year old artist, TATONG RECHETA TORRES, who unveils his talents in watercolor and charcoal on a subject that promises to level the pleasure in the art of painting with the current craze for horror movies.

Entitled "DOMINION," the exhibition pronounces the huge mass and folds of the human anatomy and the vile expressions of the humanoid face. Further, it pontificates the fecal world of fantasies at the portal of death. Inside the glazed walls of the un-natural, the incarnate beauty of the male and female bodies come to their fatal end---snapped by ropes or chopped apart.
Tatong's works in watercolor display a panorama of the subliminal greed for power over life and death without the dread and darkness of ghoulic horror. Instead, his turns of images cast a euphemism of his subject with his use of brilliant colors, algorithmic details of the interior chambers and levitating blocks of wood, and the gothic-drawn arches of tree trunks in the background. His spaces are filled with doll-like ornaments representing the slaves and victims and toys of an obese tyrant. It is a world that at once fascinates and repels altogether.

The exhibition highlights also Tatong's talent in figurative drawings. His lone and central figure, a shaven-head giant with a bulbous anatomy, has an arresting life-like quality, together with its facial expressions. Tatong modeled him after a real-life parking lot attendant who stands 4 feet and 11 inches and weighs almost 300 pounds Obesity is both a personal and social experience to an individual person. The harrowing experience of drawing adverse attention from the familiar faces and strangers is matched by a gnawing anger and a silent scream of loneliness. This numbing fear of isolation is known well by Tatong who grew up from boyhood up to adolescence inside a fat body. His first one-man exhibition "Dominion" spouts from the alliance of his memories to the condition of his "fatso" model.

Tatong tells that he learned to draw figures ahead of writing his first alphabet letters. He worked for his personal upkeep and education until his third year in the College of Architecture at the Mapua Institute of Technology. Between 2004 and 2006, he participated in six group shows and national painting competitions, besides teachng children the art of drawing.

The exhibtion runs until October 31. Hiraya Gallery is located at 530 U.N. Avenue, Ermita, Manila. Gallery hours are from 9 to 5, Mondays to Saturdays and by appointment, Sundays.