AMBIGUOUS: 14 Latest Works by Tony Perez
June 23 - 30, 2023
Gallery 928 4th Floor, Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Mandaluyong City and Gallery 928
AYSN Building, 3rd Floor, P. Tuazon Boulevard corner C. Benitez Street, Cubao, Quezon City
Artist's Notes:
Artist's Notes to the 14 Paintings:
1) Joel Cruz is a student I had at university, and we have kept in touch with each other over the years. I made his portrait after Card #1, The Magician, from the major arcana of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Most of the props used in this portrait are implements of the Order of The Golden Dawn. I added imagery to interpolate the meaning of the card.
2) _That Evening, in the Professor's Study_ was conceived as a comic book panel from my unfinished and abandoned project _The Spirit Questors Komiks_. (Abandoned because each panel takes me at least two weeks to finish to my satisfaction.) The professor's three grandchildren in this scene express disinterest toward his discovery. The message, therefore, is directed to the viewer. The dog in the foreground is our late pet Cerefina.
3) _Night Ocean_ portrays six pieces of coral I brought home from Grande Island, in Zambales, while I was working on four murals titled _Four of the Seven Philippine Winds_ for the resort's reception lobby.
4) _Night Train Passing Through_ is set in an albeit tweaked image of my previous bedroom on the upper floor of our house. The MRT passes along EDSA, which is perpendicular to P. Tuazon Boulevard, the street where we live, and is visible through the bedroom's east window. I shortened the distance between the bedroom and the elevated train rails, and made the painting as minimalist as possible to showcase the juxtaposition of movement and repose.
I believe that only men will completely understand this painting. The model for this painting was the same model for my _Saint Sebastian_ for Maryhill School of Theology.
5) _Night Shift_ is a deconstruction of P. Tuazon Boulevard and our neighborhood. I used to watch employees trudging to and from work through the south window of my previous bedroom. I myself did night shifts for APEC and POTUS visits before I retired; single, male employees were typically assigned to such shifts. While this painting seems the most straightforward of all 14, it is ambiguous in that the viewer cannot be sure whether the man on the road is going to the factory in the distance, to the woman in the building on the left, or to the three men in the building on the right.
6) _Night Classes_ features old structures that housed martial arts dojos, career schools, and boarding homes at Cubao Crossing before these were torn down to give way to motels and grocery stores. The dome of Araneta Coliseum is in the background.
7) _Sleepwalker_ is set outside my parents' house; the window on the ground floor is to my mother's room while that on the upper floor is to my sisters'. The building behind the adobe fence is the erstwhile Zodiac Pharmaceutical, now Samson College of Science and Technology. To the left is the former Manayon Compound, where a condominium tower is still currently being built. EDSA, again, is in the background, depicted here long before the MRT ever existed.
8) _The Caretaker's Daughter_ was modeled by the eldest child of a former tenant on our compound.
9) _Self-Portrait as Gorgon_ was painted on an old metal roasting tray that author Cecilia Brained used to reinforce one side of an LBC box she sent me two years ago. The box contained a complete set of carefully-wrapped Wedgwood dinnerware she gifted me. There was another metal tray on the other side, and books and magazines all around. All pieces of the dinnerware set arrived in perfect condition.
10) _Kumanthong Cabinet_ is an actual cabinet that we have in our house. (As a matter of fact that is the foyer of our house.) It contains seven kumanthong from Thailand that I collected over the years. Five were purchased in Singapore and two by an acquaintance in Thailand, off the border of Malaysia.
11) _The Constellations of Men_ was based on a dream I had after I graduated from university. That's my parents' house again in the background. I never tried to figure out what that dream meant, but it was a numinous dream and I remember waking up terrified. Even at the time I was determined to make a painting of that dream someday.
12) _Rain_ was one of three unfinished paintings my elder son Nelson left behind when he passed away in 1998. I saved all of them--he also left two, finished oil paintings which I had framed. In this one he'd completed the construction lines and had begun layering paint on the female figure in black, white, and gray. Do try to find the Minotaur-like water buffalo that he included on the right side.
13) _Bernardo Carpio_ was made on a PVC tabletop; I have always been fascinated by its grid, which could possibly be a guide to the location of playing cards (or Tarot cards) and wondered what kind of images I could superimpose on it. I originally titled the painting _Bruce Wayne_ but eventually decided against it. The background is based on the August 2022 alignment of planets.
14) _The Copse_ was painted purely from imagination, but I am always fascinated by rice fields interspersed with copses whenever I am in a car traveling north.
15) _The Builders_ is the culmination of a search for seven male models to fit the characters in the tableau. One of them is the same model for the young man in _Night Train Passing_. Another is the same model for my painting titled _Resurrection_ for Maryhill School of Theology. Yet another is the boy who sat for the dream ego in _The Constellations of Men_. It took me months before I found the right model for this boy, because I wanted that figure to be ambiguously masculine/feminine.