Lures from the other Land

Lures from the other land

In Lures from the Other Land, Pope Bacay continues his exploration of place and landscapes while diving deeper into abstraction—a trajectory he began developing during his final year at the UP Diliman College of Fine Arts, alongside his photorealistic fragmentations and amalgamations of architectural forms—with works that experiment with texture, gesture, and scale.

For this exhibition, the artist adopts a more fluid and intuitive process to produce variegated topographies, wherein the materiality of oil painting, its slow and dense accretions of textures, are foregrounded. On these canvases, some of which are shaped like puddles or islands, skies collapse into land and water, forming archipelagos and continents of scratched and murky zones, demarcated yet connected by drips and slithering strokes, that blend and cascade. In selecting monumental dimensions for his paintings, Bacay seeks not to record sceneries as he imagines them but to channel the senses they inspire, to condense, refine, and assemble these fleeting images and sensations into immersive, painterly collages. 

After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and having spent most of this time confined in his home, Bacay’s longing for other places has only heightened and has since expanded towards the unknown, unseen, and imaginary, leading him to delve further into this lure of the unknowable: its magnetism and mystique, its ability to pique curiosity and draw one in despite potential threats, and the desire and impulse to reach places we do not know or acquire things we do not have. 

Like artificial intelligence software that analyze large quantities of images to generate dreamlike environments, Bacay gathers vague signifiers of place, harnessing the senses and memories these evoke, to transform canvases into substrates on which aggregate and otherworldly landscapes could grow, conveying the power of earth’s vastness while taking root in our subjective experiences. -Dominic Zinampan

Through his works, Bacay transforms landscapes into organisms that mutate each time a mark is added or altered. Imbued and teeming with life, Bacay’s paintings are dynamic terraria that absorb and accumulate tectonic plates or constellations of gestures that evolve into morphing impressions of landforms and biomes, aquatic bodies and mycorrhizal networks, microscopic life and cartographic configurations, weather systems and astronomical phenomena, sediments, minerals, petroleum deposits, and vegetation, rock formations and agricultural land. Thus, a stroke could be a stem, stream, cell, chasm, swamp, vein, dendrite, border, rain drop, cloud, or island all at once. 

While the exhibition title may bring to mind discourses of Orientalism, exoticism, and postcolonial othering, Bacay does not find “the other,” as used in the title, to be a clearly defined or assigned category. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of difference—as opposed to the formation of an irreconcilable divide—whose character shifts depending on a given situation. Bacay cites as an example how he feels uneasy trying to settle down in a certain place as he would often long for the qualities of other places. For Bacay, this feeling is best encapsulated by the German word Fernweh which could be literally translated as “far sickness” or a desire for distant, far-off places.