Recent Works

group show at Modeka Creative Space, Oct 5-26, 2024. Featuring works by Matina Partosa, Gia Luistro, and Art Tavera. Curated by Gerardo Tan.

How to resist the genericity of a trope like abstract art? When the term painting is brought up, for a lot of folks this trope easily comes to mind – a messy array of colored pigments spread and splattered, slathered on thickly across a canvas ground. The image is that of a painting, itself innocuous enough to happily hang in a hotel lobby or by the landing of a stairwell of a well-appointed house or above a bespoke cushy couch. Treating painting this way, one may fail to realize the process and thinking involved in making them beyond their just looking reticently cool and pretty. But if they do look so, the paintings themselves are blameless.

Gerardo Tan, with an eye and a sensibility of a painter, pierces through that veneer and gathers his observation through this show of three young painters

“Their works caught my attention in my regular gallery visits. I thought their works will resonate with each other if put together in a show particularly their good handling of paint and image with three distinct approaches to abstraction, i.e. Gia Luistro’s malleable treatment of paint resulting in some kind of ambiguous imagery that oscillates between figuration and abstraction; Art Tavera’s energetic paint passages that gives his abstractions strong physical presence in contrast to Matina Partosa’s luminous surfaces that can refer to translucent layers of digital images.”

text taken from the Modeka Creative Space post.