Locus

LOCUS

8 Feb 2020 - 29 Feb 2020 - Underground Art Gallery, Makati City

The art critic, Lucy Lippard, begins her book, "The Lure of the Local (Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society),” with a quote from Focault’s elaborate lecture on Heterotopia. It says, "We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed." Hence, there is an emphasis in our relationships with sites and situations when we continue to exist through a period of concurrent transformations and bearings. In his fifth one-man exhibition, Pope Bacay considers the “place” as a postulation free from its geographical and physical groundings. He situates it as an imagined continuous mass that takes over the territories of the living.

“Locus” reconciles the idea of how places are existing in its own realm ---fragmented landscapes that transform into a singular terrain where the partitions are unknown but can only be read in its singularity. Here, the heavily textured paintings on shaped canvas reveal an aerial view of Bacay’s conjured sites; a gathering of what looks like landforms and bodies of water that appeal to familiarity and the unmapped, thus, allowing us to survey the place as it responds to the visceral feeling of being  clutched by the surrounding elements of nature. Meanwhile, multiple drawings and markings on paper become tools for spatial remembering ---the act of repetition can concretize images of places drawn from memory.

With a body of works that confronts the different articulations of forging and viewing landscapes, Bacay surveys the restrictions of materiality and medium through contrasting variations of rendering. In this exhibition, abstraction encompasses the firm and yet intimate charting of regions. There is a sense of deep and poignant attraction to Bacay’s adequate translation of these places. Laid in front of us are the mutations of what it means to produce art that is “of place.” 

In the first chapter of her book, Lippard declares, "Place for me is the locus of desire." 

And it is where we are pulled out of.

-Gwen Bautista