TREK VALDIZNO
Give me space and don't tell me what to do
Until 14 November 2015
Trek Valdizno is a
Filipino and he is an abstract artist. Unusual because in Australia Filipino
art is noted for it’s social realism. Artist’s concerned with the politics of
corruption, inequality and the psychosexual drama of the Catholic Religion. Abstraction
however has a Filipino history that began in the mid 20th century
with a group of “Neo-realist” artists. So called because they strove to find a
separate and new reality in their paintings. And so it is with Trek. His works appear to be of a subject yet
it is an invention that he is striving to achieve through his spontaneous
gestural marks not an interoperation of reality.
Discussing his work
Trek asked the question, does it look Asian, is it oriental? And while a
prescriptive definition of Asian Art would be doomed as a cliché I can say that
Trek’s abstract art doesn’t seem dominated by the landscape in the way that
Australian abstract at is. Here the most rigorous abstract artists attach place names to their paintings
suggesting perhaps a connection through mood to particular landscapes while the
potent force that is Aboriginal abstract painting deepens this connection with
land into a cosmology. In comparison Trek offers us images of objects but not
of our world. These are objects that he has found in him self.
This is a kind of
Abstract Expressionism, something that was the artistic invention of the USA,
the Philippines 20th century coloniser. Part high culture missionary and part
pop culture’s adulterous concubine, the pervasive intervention of American culture
in Asia that began in the Philippines has become a question of how Asia appropriates
modernity. It’s miss read, modified to meet local requirements, and repackaged
for export back to the west where it takes it place on the shelves of a global
cultural supermarket.
And in that
supermarket Filipino abstract painting has a look about it that is hard to
mistake, a look that looks a lot like these paintings by Trek. Raw paintings
quickly made of an interior space that is far from claustrophobic.
