Shoot the piano player
Patty Eustaquio claims no great knowledge about music. An accomplished visual artist, her own reasons for mounting an exhibit that takes its inspiration or cue from the first twelve preludes and fugues in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is always self-deprecatory if not with a bit of irony. “The works in a way are an homage to music though perhaps it is with slight mockery,” she says, further offering that it makes sense “only by my absolute ignorance of it.”
“Death to the Major, Viva Minor” is nonetheless not so modest in its ambitions. Billed as a comeback exhibition of sorts for Patty (whose parallel career as one of the country’s major fashion designers has understandably scaled down her output), it has 12 pieces on display at the SLab or Silverlens Lab, a gallery showcasing contemporary local art in Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati. Composed of both objects and paintings, it’s an attempt by the artist to “make 12 works that each seem to preface a longer narrative and yet is already the work itself…each work is a prelude without an opera…” The fact that the gallery space used to be a music school and piano warehouse also served as a catalyst to Patty’s ideas for the show.
A graduate of the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts, Patty doesn’t subscribe to many of the divisions that seem to quantify the arts as either being “higher” or “lower.” She says that there’s a perception that one can’t be both an artist and a designer. In such hierarchies, her work as the latter is considered the lesser while everything, including the former, is a rung down the cultural ladder to music. That’s if we were to believe philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who Patty quotes as arguing that music is the highest form of art simply because it does not imitate nature. (Within the visual arts, she points that it’s become common to regard “still life pictures and landscapes revered in past centuries” now as “low art,” while “lace-making and ceramics just never made the cut.”)
“And so my works are simple imitations: hollow odes and vacuous praises,” writes Patty. “In one sense, I am composing a tribute to music, a symphony of abstract things beyond me, but which I understand as a listener of music, to be beautiful. My tribute therefore is shallow but pretty to bits.
“In that sense, my tribute is mere skin and decoration. A sculpture replaces its object with an exquisite carcass of its former self or with a half-sized, leather-bound mute edition.”
Patty’s perhaps being a bit disingenuous and coy about her own work’s virtues. Of course, like the work of peers Poklong Anading, Gary Ross Pastrana and Bembol de la Cruz, it’s precisely these interstices between object and its simulacra that her art discourses and operates on — like the oft-repeated comment that music occurs in the spaces between notes.
Her works are “as much about the materials they come in and the processes involved in creating them, as well as the subjects they portray: a cross between craft, art and design.” This can be especially seen in her shaped canvas oil painting, which she points out was achieved from her experience in dressmaking. It’s also not that much of a stretch to see in the folds of the crochet cast of a piano the aesthetic of haute couture.
After all, no matter the medium, it’s the mind of Patty that fashions it into art.
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Visit slab.silve-rlensphoto.com for more info.
