Ramona Rivera
Jayson Oliveria’s New Works on Paper Here, Fuck You Over There, flips the bird at conventional expectations while actually succeeding in what a painting exhibition should be. The show which opened last August 18 at Mag:net Columns looks like an exploded artist’s sketchpad; or windblown detritus collecting at the juncture of a busy intersection in a tangled web of paint, spit and paper.
Mr. Oliveria studied Painting at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in the 1990s and since then has been consistently reconfiguring it and turning it upside down. His earlier works experimented with abstraction, minimal color and rawness of material. In recent years, he shifted to a more expressionistic type of figuration, which he sometimes sabotages even before its done – a gesture not far from destroying a piece of evidence before someone else can get hold of it.
In this new exhibition, fairly large oils on canvas paper and sprawling collage installations are a lazy fit on the gallery’s tightly configured wall spaces and floors emphasizing the “no-problem”atic and self-contradictory nature of the exhibit itself. The main body of works are called “Demotivational Posters” the first of which hangs, or should I say, is crammed onto a wall roughly half its size; it’s edges curling up against a glass wall on one side and projecting into space on the other. The word “FIAL?”(FAIL) is misspelled in bold red letters across the top establishing the thread of cleverly circular absurdist humor prevalent throughout the exhibition. The “poster” presents the perfect slogan for the failed- so much so that it fails to even declare failure and ends with a question mark. However, by succeeding in aptly portraying the absurdities of failure, the work itself ultimately fails to fail and has the last laugh.
Most of the images used in the exhibition; randomly found or mined from the internet quagmire, some even twice or thrice regurgitated – are disposable salvagings from the recycle bin of public consciousness and have little value or connection beyond their service as vehicles for the act of painting. The works universally evoke the casual ease and detachment of sketches. Paper itself, medium as well as ground is used to full expression-in the form of misprints, found photographs and clippings. Crumpled, cut, painted, collaged and sculpted into horn or phallus, it is painting and paper. There is no concept; it is all about delivery.
(Jayson Oliveria’s “New Works on Paper Here, Fuck You Over There” is ongoing at Mag:net Columns until September 18, 2010)
