On Timelessness, Beauty and Space
Much has been said about time, beauty and space’s incongruous relationship with distance, scale and perspective – views that intimate that in as much as the three are in themselves defined, they are ambivalently capable of expanding and encroaching their respective bounds.
Famed fashion designer-turned-visual artist Jef Albea treaded on this paradoxical-yet-poignant aspect of time, beauty and space in his first solo show in Cebu.
Titled “Timeless: The Art of Jef Albea” and presented by NUSTAR Resort and Casino at the foyer of integrated resort’s The Mall from August 19 to 26, the exhibit served as the artist’s homecoming show in the country after successfully staging exhibits at the New York Art Fair, the Paris Art Fair, the Thailand Art Show, Milan Design Week and a show in Doha, Qatar.
It mainly drew all sights to Albea’s take on tempering a figurative score to the baselines of constructivist themes – a creative leaning which is driven by his keen attention to detail and a solid understanding of the lyrical fluidity of forms.
Featuring standing pieces and painted canvas-set reliefs, the exhibit largely played up Albea’s capacity to create a sense of depth, dimensionality and movement into his works – a feat which he projects by understanding what the material properties of an object are and what its spatial presence manifests as.
Complementing his compositional tonalities is an elemental approach to simply capture what is beautiful as it is, and this largely underscored the thematic leanings of the show, that is, to frame the timelessness of beauty and the spaces it governs.
Equal parts decorative and thought-provoking, the show played with the concept of how the distance between two points is not always necessarily a straight line – alluding that in as much as space can divide, it can also connect.
As the show engaged viewers to lose themselves in taking in the “space” that the artworks physically occupy and metaphorically encroach, it portended that time, beauty and space can be tangible constructs that can had without being held and be lost without being foregone.
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