Beginning with a lone painting entitled O (6,000 painted bricks) which stood ten feet tall inside a gallery at her MFA show in Goldsmiths, London in 2009, Maria Taniguchi's continued exploration of large paintings of monochromatic brickwork has made it into several galleries around the world particularly in her homeland, at Silverlens Gallery in the Philippines; at Art Basel's Art Statements in Switzerland last year; and most recently, at the Khalid Shoman Foundation in Jordan for an artist-in-residence program. The tall, towering edifices looming in either width or height have become a prevailing structure for Taniguchi's now untitled series of paintings designed after a particular line scheme, the transversely coordinated rectangular blocks that resemble pieces of bricks that make up a wall. These walls have become stark representations of Taniguchi's ideas about art—methodical constructions and re-constructions. They have continued to pervade gallery walls to leave us only with a kind of imprint, a remnant of Taniguchi's almost in-traceable subject/content via her methodology. 

It is a wall that stands dark against the gallery's white surroundings, a monolithic figure, a black slab that ascends vertically. And in its dim and neutral tone, it is almost unceremoniously cast as a large shadow. It is a wall, of plain and rigid structure. It has nothing, but everything in it requires our attention. And our close inspection starts by warding off ideas that make us susceptible to perceive such painting as an abstraction. As Taniguchi suggests, it is not. It is a representation of an object, a wall possibly, diminished in monochromatic expression. Not even pattern painting or automatism. Not even an exercise in repetition, as each rectangular block can be rendered with its own unique shade of gray. If we see it as an entity that is completely mechanized, or a process which is completely automated, it then inevitably leads us to marvel at the strategic glitches on some surfaces that were uncannily predetermined by the artist with her human touch. Who would have thought that the slightest shift in tones of black and gray on a specific area could drastically change the narrative of the whole piece? Who knew, that in the bare bones representation of a bricked wall lurks behind an exhausting polemical time bomb about presence, identity, or even nothingness?

Maria Taniguchi, who received her Bachelor's degree in Sculpture at the University of the Philippines, has been an ardent explorer of the more palpable arts which she usually incorporates in her work using contemporary media like video. Though she may not display actual objects, she demonstrates how the materiality of these objects is shaped: clay, raw slabs of marble, or even objects of industrial scale like the Manila jeepneys. She tackles the nature of her objects through documentation: the clay is dug from the earth, the marble is slowly chipped to form a sculpture, and the metal chassis of a jeepney is sensuously portrayed. These are renditions that bring to light the essential qualities of each material. And to explore this may lead to a mild anticipation of discovering a possible basic substance that is inherent in all objects of art. For Taniguchi, her fastidiously rendered, large-scale 'brick' paintings serve as a starting point, as a locus for her ideas on construction/production. It is an accumulation of manners that builds into a fortress. She sees it not as a surface of expression but as an armature, a basic ground that supports her ideas toward art. For her, it is functional than expressive, a meditation rather than a statement. If art were a game to be played, she sees her painting as a rulebook.

This takes us to that old polemic on art at the end of the eighteenth century, when artists started to acknowledge their freedom of vision, their freedom to choose their own vocabulary, their own subject matter. The immediate consequence was the anxiety brought about by the complexities of perception. Suddenly there was visual chaos that needed to be apprehended. There was a commanding influx of choices, and for the first time, there were theories and principles of beauty that needed to be formulated. Aesthetics. It seems that in the realm of art, Soren Kierkgaard's apologetic Christian adage will also hold true: anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

As for Maria Taniguchi's new paintings that will be shown in Silverlens Gillman Barracks, Singapore, as well as in Art Stage Singapore, there seems to be that reckoning of going back, not to an old formula by abstractionists who try to stage the invisible through certain ground rules (lines, color, geometrical figures, or other a priori substrates), but to ward off the visual chaos among representational painting and to go back to the hardened substance of earthen qualities—the interaction of light, shadow, shape, and scale against a surface, and to arrive at a new image through summation, not through mere juxtaposition or surreal superimposition which has been for so long methods abused in our digital age.

The qualities of Maria Taniguchi's brick paintings may seem to denote blankness, absence, or a muted expression. But through its demanding scale and rigid discipline it permeates a presence which we can decipher by looking at it directly and unceremoniously, as self-effacing as the artwork itself, void of our preconceived visual locutions to be able to ride the harmony of chance, the euphony of process, and the melody of the surface's interaction. It is a wall, as one writer has put it, that does not close but opens, perhaps to a vista that strives for purity in form and subject matter. And although there is no denying of its tall, dark, imposing aura of solitude and sterility, its quotidian quality enhances each block and grid's singular expression. As the minutest sway of light and shade becomes amplified in its mundane setting, we can almost feel the surmounting of each shape, like the singular clay the bricklayer has to perfectly brace on top of the mortar and to carefully perpend against all other bricks, it is, to some extent, an image built rather than painted.

Words by Cocoy Lumbao

MARIA TANIGUCHI’s solo exhibition runs from 17 January to 23 February 2014 at Silverlens Gillman Barracks at 47 Malan Road, #01-25 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109444. Opening reception for the artist will be from 6pm on 17 January, Friday.

MARIA TANIGUCHI is also part of Art Stage Singapore 2014 – Platforms – Southeast Asia. Art Stage Singapore 2014 will run from 16 to 19 January 2014. Visit http://www.artstagesingapore.com for more information.

Maria Taniguchi was born and raised in Dumaguete City. After a BFA in Sculpture at the University of the Philippines, she completed an MFA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths in London in 2009. In the same year she joined the LUX Associates Artists Program, a post- academic program based in London for artists working with the moving image.

She currently lives and works in Manila, where she received the Ateneo Art Award for her solo exhibition Echo Studies (2011) at the Jorge Vargas Museum, where she showed the first of several large-scale ‘brick’ paintings, a video installation, drawings, and photographic work. The following year, she again received the Ateneo Art Award for the video Untitled (Celestial Motors) (2012) shown at Silverlens Manila.

Taniguchi was recently selected for Art Statements (2013), a section of solo presentations by emerging artists at Art Basel 44. Selected recent projects include HIWAR: Conversations in Amman (2013), a residency and exhibition program curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the Khalid Shoman Foundation in Amman; and Without a Murmur (2012), a group exhibition curated by Joselina Cruz at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) in Manila; and The Philippine Contemporary: To Scale the Past and the Possible, an exhibition curated by Patrick D. Flores at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila.

Forthcoming group exhibitions include Material Memory, Fluxia Gallery Milan, and Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics, Museum of Contemporary Art (MHKA), Antwerp. She will also be in residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2015.