A curious case of materials. Materials have their own processes, lives, and stories.

Materials tend not to be bound to linear progression. Though the American painter Joseph Schillinger in his book The Mathematical Basis of the Arts, 1943 categorized the aesthetic phenomena into phases of mimicry, ritualistic, emotional, rational, and scientific, materials have followed cyclic patterns and varied permutations.

Materials also persisted even as artists foregrounded concepts over form as an attempt to decenter objects and declassified them as commodities. American critic Lucy Lippard, in her essay The Dematerialization of Art, 1968 co-authored with John Chandler, argued for art’s trajectory towards pure intellectualism. Even the last posited phase is the “post-aesthetic” where ideas are liberated from their materiality, the engagement with materials has no finality. Materials evolve as artists innovate.

Having worked with various materials, privileged ideas over objects, and familiarity with texts on the dissolution of tangible matters of art, artists Leslie de Chavez, Jason Dy, SJ, W. Don Flores, and Carol Anne McChrystal, in their group exhibition THE RIDDLE OF MATERIALS, search for critical dialogue on their affinity with materials.

The works of these artists somehow revisit the ideas of the American artist Allan Kaprow who pioneered in creating “environments” and “happenings” in his essay The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, 1958. Kaprow observed the preoccupation of Pollock with the unexpected spaces and ordinary objects of everyday life in order to have a wider, deeper sense of some unheard-of happenings.

De Chavez investigates the symbolic aspects of the materials such as lead, beeswax, and dried animal intestines. Through the embedded historicity of the found materials, he finds some parallel narratives in the socio-political and cultural contexts of the Philippines.

For his found objects, Dy, SJ takes a cue from Filipino-American abstract expressionist artist Alfonso Ossorio. For Ossorio, these objects are really “sought-for” artifacts that artists search for consciously or unconsciously given their respective artistic inquiries. Misprint textbooks produced by DepEd used as wrappers at Dangwa Floral Market are imprinted with acrylic leaf prints or graphite rubbings. Various objects like dried flowers, carved Santos, synthetic figures, bronze nails, etc. are suspended as mobiles to represent Christian narratives of prophecy and fulfillment.

To be sensitive to the processes of the materials as suggested by anthropologist Tim Ingold in his essay The Materials Of Life, 2016, Filipino-American artist McCrystal employs synthetic materials as by-products of oil production like blue tarpaulins, single-use beverage bottles, and discarded plastic wrappers. These materials are handwoven into geometric crisscross patterns and constructed in architectural assemblages to expose the impact of extractive industry and climate catastrophe on local experiences of home and shelter.

Flores has used traditional materials like acrylic and canvas in contradistinction with the found materials by Dy and McCrystal. His interest is not in the plasticity of the paint but rather its semiotic significance of referencing the colors of the burning sugarcane fields—white smoke indicating a low moisture fire while black one, high moisture fire producing more soot. These paintings are sort of distant signals and urgent warnings of the conflicted situation between farmers and landowners in hacienda settings.

In looking at the works of these artists and how they employ materials in symbolic parallels, intuitive level, environmental scale, or semiotic plane, they have engaged in one way or the other in the process of making as Ingold described it as “a process of correspondence.” Though there are some prior experiences of the materials, they still respect the raw material substance, and unique processes of becoming, and, thus, allow their potential for image-making and meaning-making. Because of the processes of becoming, the artists are in awe of the alchemical properties of the materials that cannot be treated as immaterial, linear, and static. (AM+DG 2022)