Video by Nonoy Froilan:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oQ53k0RrVlQrD4EhihbO3PxjQA22oHdH/view?usp=drive_link
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Thursday, July 6, 2023
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Monday, July 3, 2023
The Philippine Daily Inquirer produced an online version of the article:
https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/468509/in-tony-perezs-ambiguous-each-painting-has-a-role-to-play/
Monday, June 26, 2023
Sunday, June 25, 2023
_Night Shift_
_The Copse_
_Night Classes_
_Sleepwalker_
.JPG)
Nelson Miranda and Tony Perez
Thursday, June 1, 2023
A reminder to everyone:
Ambiguous, an art exhibit featuring 14 of my latest works, opens June 23, 2023 in two separate galleries. This is an art trek--it begins 5:00 PM at Gallery 928, Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Mandaluyong, and then at 7:00 PM at Gallery 928, P. Tuazon Boulevard, Cubao. Three of my former students from different points in time will emcee the event and give brief remarks, followed by ribbon-cutting at both venues.
If we are Facebook Friends but have never met, please come up to me and introduce yourself. I am unable to recognize persons based on their photos alone, especially if their accounts bear not their real names but aliases. Those who know me well also know that I am not the type who likes hanging out, and so I may be staying at both venues for 15 minutes only. The paintings will be there, however, for eight days, and two gallery staff members will be happy to assist you.
We are still deliberating whether to offer door prizes for the 10th, 100th, and 110th guests, for example only--those are not the actual numbers--who sign the guest books. If we do, ensure that you leave your contact number or Facebook account name beside your legibly written name. The winners will be announced after the exhibit is over.
Refreshments will be served at both venues, based on the number of persons who indicated that they are coming to the opening.
You can stay in either gallery you prefer for as long as you like.
For inquiries, visit Gallery 928's Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/928Gallery.
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
AMBIGUOUS: Artist's Notes
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.
Monday, May 15, 2023
AMBIGUOUS: The Narrative
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
The Narrative:
The narrative of this exhibit is comprised of 14 different renditions of night.
The prologue piece is _Portrait of Joel Cruz as The Magician_, setting the tone for the exhibit and heralding the succession of 14 paintings that follow. The Prologue Painting is the one painting that contains all of the techniques employed in the body of works that comprise the exhibit: measurements and composition, brushwork, light-and-shadowing, color sense, use of contrast and double-entendres, and the utilization of at least four shades of color in a single work.
The first painting is _That Evening, in the Professor's Study_, a simulated panel from _The Spirit Questors Komiks_. In his dialogue bubble the professor announces the secret to traveling between enchanted trees via astral railways, like those of elevated trains. One such railway is in the next painting, _Night Ocean (Diptych)_, hovering over land and the sea of the Unconscious. This motif of the railway continues in _Night Train Passing Through_, where a young man in his bedroom is about to drift off to sleep after a hard massage. Meanwhile, in the district, a man trudges up a street in _Night Shift_. In _Night Classes_ we see various night shifts already at work within a cluster of buildings. _Sleepwalker_ follows, in which a boy climbs a ladder presumably to go over a stone fence. In _The Caretaker's Child_, the little girl is not sleepwalking but likewise dreams.
The second part of the exhibit takes the viewer into actual dream states, beginning with the artist's _Self-Portrait as Gorgon_, which serves as the transition painting from the first part. _Kumanthong Cabinet_ shows us a boy spirit come to life from its statuette, stepping out into the interior of the house where he is enshrined, and then, in _Constellations_, he goes outside the house and looks at the stars in the night sky. Dream slides into fantasy in the deconstructed female figure in _Rain_ and in the Philippine myth of _Bernardo Carpio_, who is suspended in eternity preventing two mountains from colliding with each other. And then there is _The Copse_, where a man sits beside a bonfire under the trees. The final piece is _The Builders_. In this, fourteenth, piece the viewer can assume that some of the men in the previous paintings are taking a brandy break from a day of construction work in Cubao.
Sunday, May 7, 2023
AMBIGUOU: List of Paintings
AMBIGUOUS
14 Latest Works by Tony Perez
June 23 - 30, 2023
An Art Trek through two galleries:
Gallery 928
4th Floor, Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Mandaluyong City
Opens 5:00 PM Friday, June 23
and
Gallery 928
AYSN Building, 3rd Floor, P. Tuazon Boulevard corner C. Benitez Street, Cubao, Quezon City
Opens 7:00 PM Friday, June 23
List of Paintings:
1. Portrait of Joel Cruz as The Magician (from the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck)
Oil on cradled canvas
Oil on cradled canvas
5' x 3'
2023
2. That Evening, in the Professor's Study
Oil on acousticon board
24" x 24"
2022
3. Night Ocean (Diptych)
Oil on cradled canvas
4' x 4'
2022
4' x 4'
2022
4. Night Train Passing Through (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?)
Oil on cradled canvas
4' x 4.4'
2022
5. Night Shift
Oil on board
14" x 23.5"
Oil on board
14" x 23.5"
2022
6. Night Classes
Oil on board
13" x 21.5"
Oil on board
13" x 21.5"
2022
7. Sleepwalker
Oil on board
20" x 21"
2022
20" x 21"
2022
8. The Caretaker's Child
Oil on board
16.25" x 12.25"
2022
9. Self-Portrait as Gorgon
Oil on metal roasting tray
16.75" x 14"
2022
10. Kumanthong Cabinet
Oil on board
15" x 12.5"
2022
11. The Constellations of Men
Oil on cradled canvas
2022
12. Rain
Tony Perez and Nelson Miranda
Oil on board
14" x 20"
1997 and 2022
Tony Perez and Nelson Miranda
Oil on board
14" x 20"
1997 and 2022
13. Bernardo Carpio
Oil on PVC tabletop
35" x 23.5"
2022
14. The Copse
Oil on board
13" x 19"
2022
15. The Builders
Oil on cradled canvas
4.5' x 8'
2023
Sunday, April 23, 2023
My friends, the definite dates for my next exhibit titled Ambiguous are June 23 - 30, 2023. It will be an Art Trek.
Part One of the exhibit will open 5:00 PM at Gallery 928, 4th Floor, Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Mandaluyong City.
We will then give the viewers an hour of viewing time and another hour to commute to the next venue.
Part Two of the exhibit will open 7:00 PM at Gallery 928, AYSN Building, 3rd Floor, P. Tuazon Boulevard corner C. Benitez Street, Cubao, Quezon City.
All of you are cordially invited.
Thursday, April 20, 2023
April 19, 2023
Welcome to my messy studio area. I am not one of those artists who Post picture-perfect photos of their clean studios. In the first place I don't have a real studio. I don't paint for a living, and, after I die, my granddaughters would have no use of one. After I finish all 40 paintings for Maryhill School of Theology I shall redo this room completely and you won't ever imagine that this was how it used to look like.
I've applied the 38th and last glaze on this painting, and it's finally done.
Portrait of Joel Cruz as The Magician (from the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck)
Oil on cradled canvas
5' x 3'
March 13 - April 19, 2023
Oil on cradled canvas
5' x 3'
March 13 - April 19, 2023
This is the Prologue Painting for my next exhibit. A Prologue Painting typically contains the method of composition, measurements, and brushwork in all of the paintings comprising the bulk of the exhibit, and serves somewhat like the overture to a full musical. In my case the featured elements are my use of midlines, the division of each painting into two sections, and the application of the Greek Golden Rectangle in each section.
As you can see, I also chose to reveal some of the secrets of this Tarot card. They become evident only when you are physically standing in front of the painting.
I am currently discussing exhibit possibilities with the gallery owner. We'll announce when and where it will be, and all of you are cordially invited. I need to wait for this painting to dry before varnishing, and then have four other paintings framed. I have only one painting framed each month, however.
Yes, it took me a year and a half to complete all of 15 pieces of varied sizes, and that seems to be the pace I'll be following through the end of my life.
I did not take photos of the 14 other pieces composing the body of the exhibit. I will do so only after the exhibit opens.
