Painting with Feelings
SOLO EXHIBITION BY
Kevin Balboa
SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
There are no events safe from impediments. But they are all temporary, we tell ourselves. They probably aren’t, but they might be if you will it hard enough. Where some of our alliances and companionships deteriorate and lose their warm exteriors, we become enveloped by a space that perfectly mirrors our interiors─ chaotic and distressed. The worry overcasts us, crippling our composure, marking our being, and trimming us down in size. We deal with our fallouts, sometimes ill-equipped, and then burdened by the repercussions of these scenarios. Yet, despite it all, we get through with our mechanisms to grapple with our reality. Some of these are said to maintain emotional stability, bounce us back, and flourish us. Lui Manaig, in his tell-all, puts these to use.
There is no unspoken moment of an affliction reduced to a bearable amount and nipped in the bud until it does not show. Manaig hands this in identities put bluntly and boldly, dragging the unfiltered out in the open. Like what we have always done, uttering our woes in words, in works and figurations, and holding it out for some kind of liberation, some form of recovery, reduced to the tiniest scars. In shadows and contours, his is detailed by patterns, his pop surrealist take on personal narratives, and navigating pretenses in polychrome.
This is his painting with feelings. But these feelings are stripped off with pleasantries, withdrawn into personas, and clothed and unclothed into his metaphorical self-preservation.
There are instances where trauma cannot simply be scaled down to a bit. Manaig stresses these depictions, all heavy in their elements, as he seeks some recuperation, in coping, in quiet, and in the self. After all, this is how we get by.
– Taco Borja
