Avant Auctions, the Philippine pioneer in online art auctions, is accepting bids via www. avantauctions.com for its Auspicious Auction, consisting of 80 choice paintings, now on view at the Saturday Group Gallery 4/F, East Wing, Shangri-La Mall in Mandaluyong.
Real-time hammering will start at 1:30 p.m. on March 2.
We sorted through the collection and following are eight of the notable offerings.
Lot 9—“Gas Sta. 1,” Kawayan de Guia, 53×55 in., mixed media on canvas, 2011
De Guia’s painting, at first blush, appears a whimsical pastiche of discordant images. But it is a highly polemic juxtaposition of interrelated signifiers of power and abuse amid globalization, petroleum, transportation, deforestation and war.
Lot 14—“Up,” Elaine Navas, 48×72 in., oil on canvas, 2016
The upward trail of a creeping crack on a random brick wall in Navas’ hand is at once picturesque and terrifying. The tonal variations in the brick pattern’s rendering is obsessive, which softens the violence or foreshadows the wall’s crumbling.
Lot 17—“Panciteria,” Antonio Austria, 21×32 in., oil on canvas, 2016
A depiction of people busy and happy in feast, work and communion, this painting rendered in Austria’s naïf brush is ode to the noodle houses of old, sites of nourishment and kinship, now endangered by malls and fastfood chains.
Lot 20—“Breaking dawn,” Arturo Luz, 32x24in., acrylic on canvas, 2014
Profound significations of the temporal are re-imagined in their most basic terms. “Breaking dawn,” then, is a breaking down of the city’s chaos, it’s people, even the brightness of the sun, in minimalist terms.
Lot 24—“Luksong baka,” H.R. Ocampo, 22×15 in., pen on paper, 1977
A rare figurative sketch, this drawing of a traditional Filipino street play departs from Ocampo’s well-known abstractions but nevertheless displays his masterful deployment of lines and shapes.
Lot 35—“Nude in my studio,” Federico Aguilar Alcuaz, 24×30 in., oil on canvas, 1977
This painting of a shirtless woman couched comfortably inside Alcuaz’s studio is a celebration of artistic and sexual freedoms, the kind that gives birth to objet d’art, neither obscene nor decadent.
Lot 48—“The return of the king,” R.A. Tijing, 40×48 in., oil on canvas, 2014
Seemingly comical in its use of cartoon-like characters, Tijing’s depiction of a royal homecoming is also eerily bewildering in its measured quietude thus begging questions: where’s the crowd of well wishers, the confetti and trumpets?
Lot 80—“The borderland between sleep and wakefulness,” Jon Jaylo, 48×36 in., 2017
Jaylo pays homage to Salvador Dali in this painting which purports to locate the most liminal of spaces, lying between sleep and wakefulness, between conscious and unconscious. The effect is powerfully strange and surreal. –CONTRIBUTED
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