Artist Statement A thin line to only surrender yourself to the darker pleasure. Our pleasure of giving meaning and association to certain things tangible and intangible.
I create a feeling of disparity between the imaginable and unimaginable through my chosen mode of creation. I release a dozen feelings of uncertainties on the images I create and compose. It creates a tension of beguiling temptation, like the snake to Eve in the garden of Eden.
I paint something that is not what it is. Like a cognitive dissonance. My psyche keeps on sending mixed signals of different pictures with vibrations that creates confusions of the narrative. It creates a vague metaphor on things with exact meanings.
Picasso once said "every act of creation is first an act of destruction".
– Valdizno, Trek (2022)
Exhibition Notes In Retrospect
From the moment Trek Valdizno decided to defer the completion of a degree to dedicate his time and energy on painting, no one doubted that he would produce a litany of shows spanning thirty years. He continues to do so feverishly staying true to a regime of studio work adopted from a mentor, Roberto Chabet. It is timely for the artist to celebrate a milestone with a gallery that mounted three of his solo exhibitions in the last decade.
An intro video provides a virtual tour of San Rafael, Bulacan showing the artist scouring the countryside on his bike between studio rituals. It hints on the origin of his creative impulses. His journeys through phantasmagorical imagery are apparent in a text-based document of a solo show in 2008. These “urgent discussions” between the artist, the gallerist and myself affirm Trek’s intimate connection with nature who in turn reveals it in its rawest state on canvas.
His brushwork demonstrates vibratos over a range of silhouettes. They oscillate from shapes of earthly elements such as insects, birds, flowers, and minerals to the vibration of cosmic and astral bodies. With a measured demeanor for invention, the artist’s approach to painting is constant and timeless, as epitomized in a most memorable exhibition in three parts at the Cultural Center of the Philippines entitled Cloud (1993).
It is from an abundance of external stimuli that the artist gathers momentum to call on a new order of the mysterious. Valdizno expedites dilutions of acrylic paint and employs intuitive methods of building form through color. The artist’s temptation to employ impasto is bequeathed to an underlayment that invites ambulatory patterns of dispersion leaving natural forms of resistance to embody transient revelations.
The exhibit lingers on an introspective note where an album lies limpid on a pedestal. It appears to have been submerged in floodwater transforming the artist’s memories into languid reflections of still, murky water over rice paddies. Juxtaposed against a tableau (Love in Acapulco 2, 2020) made during an intense period of the pandemic, this album of decrepit photographs alludes to the artist’s desire to rise from the ashes.
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