"Walking is a Dwelling"
Pope Bacay at Artinformal
To walk is to move, to pass a course from one place to another, a motion that keeps lived experience in flux.
For Pope Bacay, walking is a means of source material, where the process of movement becomes a space of dwelling. Through observing and documenting myriad items discarded or for disposal on the street, the artist reflects that these objects collectively create a sense of home. The objects come together in a collage-like manner, reminiscent of assembling a structure.
With a regular practice of taking photographs of windows, Bacay focuses on central subjects, while hyper-aware of the surrounding elements.
After experiencing the aftermath of flooding in Venice during a Biennale, Bacay observed residents taking items out of their homes to be disposed of—waterlogged mattresses, ruined documents, and brittle leather bags. This prompted the artist to begin visual reflections on the spectacle of discarded items.
After a recent trip to Europe, Bacay now presents a sofa in Switzerland, visually reupholstered in blue, recreated from the memory of a lost camera. He paints scenes of immaculate, snow-capped mountains and pristine lakes, the Alps contrasting against gradient skies, with the small frames juxtaposed against painted wood panels.
Also among his observations are discarded paraphernalia in the Philippines. The artist places a Baroque-style armchair in a frame, once plush, now ravaged, and passed over in San Juan City. Near it is an image of a clock taken from a confidant in the United States, as valued friends contribute to the artist’s process of personal archiving.
Unafraid to oscillate between two visual languages, Bacay remains consistent in his larger practice by moving between abstractionist paintings and depictions of realist structures, as both styles maintain a sense of the surreal and self-referential.
In Susan Sontag’s defiant and intimate essay “On Style,” she writes, “To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched” (1965).
The artwork of Pope Bacay exists in the world while creating worlds that are self-referring, presenting information and evaluations that communicate the artist’s experience in a state of thrall and captivation. What traveler does not walk the streets in Europe and feel like they’re flying? With a distinct sense of expression, Bacay collages objects from his lived experience to draw attention to the beauty in details that go unnoticed, as he celebrates and elevates the everyday.
Works cited:
Sontag, Susan. "On Style." Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. Penguin Classics, 2009, pp. 196-242.
- Angela Singian
