Rico Lascano’s “Continuum,” which opens May 24 at Galerie Roberto, continues his abstractionist path that however evokes the elements.

An abstractionist to the core, Lascano hardly remembers ever painting in the representational vein. Though classically trained in the fine arts and steeped for decades in the image-ridden world of advertising, the artist continually seeks refuge and finds aesthetic solace in the nonrepresentational realm, known as abstraction, nonobjective or nonfigurative art.

While a rebuke to physical, observable reality, Lascano’s abstraction is nonetheless inseparable from the elements: water, air, earth. Through his formless abstractions, the artist summons sensations of celestial space as an equivalent to spiritual idylls. Bodies of water such as ponds, streams and rivers aspire to a meditative condition, an effortlessness of connection with emotions, summoned by sensations of Zen space, without a single fixed viewpoint. Lascano’s works are transfixed in physical space only as a state of “no-mindness.”

“Continuum” adverts to Lascano’s slowly evolving art, as a journey through time, and abiding by the words of the poet T. S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Despite two decades of successive exhibitions, Rico Lascano’s quest for boundless space endures and continues…

“Continuum” runs until June 7. —CONTRIBUTED

Galerie Roberto is at Unit 4, Molito Lifestyle Extension Bldg., Madrigal Ave. corner Commerce Ave., Alabang, Muntinlupa City; tel. 8091630, 0998-5955764, 0905-3146448.