Nestor Olarte Vinluan's From Sculpture and Other Recent Works at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan (November 10-23)

Pieces for a Mandala Number Four, 2004
Sand, cement and volcanic stones

Nestor Olarte Vinluan
From Sculpture Square and Other Recent Works
10 – 23 November 2006
Mag:net Gallery Katipunan

To Sculpture Square and Back: Transporting the Physical in Nestor Vinluan's Works

When former University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts (UP CFA) Dean Nestor Olarte Vinluan packed his bags and boarded a plane for Singapore to take part in the Sculpture Square Artist's Residency program nearly two years ago, little did it occur to him then that the life-sized three-dimensional works that he produced during the exchange program would be later exhibited in Manila partly as photographic installations.

In his show From Sculpture Square and Other Recent Works at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan this November, Vinluan recreates the body of works he produced during open studio sessions at Sculpture Square's Chapel Gallery from February 16 to March 11, 2004. Vinluan produced his works in the former chapel-turned-art space while interacting with arts practitioners from the Nanyang Academy of Fines Arts, National Institute of Education, and the National University of Singapore, capping the month-long residency program with a solo exhibition there.

Nearly two years later, the Mag:net show recalls the paintings, sculptures, and site-specific works produced during the Singapore residency through displaying several of the smaller (and more portable) works and representing the rest left back in Sculpture Square through photography-based installations.

Vinluan worked within the delimitations of being an overseas artist-in-residency in an industrialized nation such as Singapore: he worked with materials that were endemic to his immediate location and refused to be limited to the use of traditional art materials. This was reflected in his large-scale sculptural works, such as his aluminum wire sculptures. Fascinated with the malleable properties of readily-available thick metal wires there, Vinluan proceeded to fashion the lengthy wires into sinuous, whimsical forms by using his own body as an art tool, bending and looping the malleable material with his limbs, hands, and torso in a formidable exercise or dance of creation.

Unfortunately, many of Vinluan's life-sized sculptural works done in Singapore later on proved to be too impractical for the artist to easily transport across borders (he recalls being questioned by suspicious airport officials while bringing home some of the smaller installation-based pieces). It was in this context that Vinluan decided to use photography reproductions as a mode of representing his works. Several of his three-dimensional pieces entitled A Heart for a Tree and a Piece for the Big Art is presented through this format. In these works, Vinluan combines both geometric and biomorphic shapes, straddling the lines which normally divide the two visual fields.

Here, Vinluan utilizes photography not only as a means for perfunctory artistic documentation, but as a process to produce new works and meanings. Mechanical reproduction has enabled site-specific works that could only be experienced up close and personal in the Chapel Gallery to be displayed as two-dimensional images that can be easily replicated and disseminated anywhere else on the globe. However, the act of capturing a three-dimensional object in a photograph subtly alters their physical qualities—and meanings--from the viewer's perspective: Three-dimensional art forms that viewers could approach from any side are now presented through the premeditated angle of the camera's lens, while textures once evident in actual form are now implied in the flat surface.

Some works, however, managed to make the trip back to the Philippines and are exhibited as they are, mostly smaller installation pieces which combine geometric and biomorphic shapes and qualities. Pieces for a Mandala is composed of vertically-oriented slab sculptures whose forms and positions recall images of ancient ceremonial pillars or funerary stone markers. Vinluan positions the pieces as an outward arrangement of objects in space, a tableau of radiating patterns.

Vinluan also exhibits large spherical sculptures carved out of cement with metal scaffolding, left unpainted, and smaller “found” shapes from painted river and volcanic stones . There is an aesthetic irony at work here: The artist paints over small stones that are naturally found and produced, but painstakingly and intentionally works to sculpt orbs that seem to have been made by natural forces alone, untouched by the hand of man. Vinluan has been producing sculptures of this type since his 1980s art-practice in as a masteral student in New York, saying that he continues to be inspired by observing nature.

Vinluan also presents a series of new works on paper entititled Axis Mundi, an extension of his growing body of abstract paintings.

From Sculpture Square and Other Recent Works by Nestor Vinluan runs from November 10 to 23, 2006 at Mag:net Gallery Katipunan. Mag:net Katipunan is at Agcor Bldg.. 335 Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Quezon City. For inquiries contact 9293191 (Malou) or email magnetcafekatips@yahoo.com.ph