SILVERLENS is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Renato Orara from 18 - 30 January 2016 at Artspace@Helutrans. The show features work from Ten Thousand Things that Breathe, a series of drawings on paper that the artist has been making since 1989. Each piece highlights objects or moments that Orara has encountered within and outside his habitat in New York. They are typically everyday things that the artist coaxes into being with fine layers of ballpoint pen ink on blank sheets of paper.

Having studied fine arts at the Philippine High School for the Arts at a time of unprecedented creative ferment and political upheaval in the Philippines, Orara diverged from the ‘academic’ path of an artist by majoring in Psychology upon going to college. During those years, he nonetheless continued to create mostly conceptual art, exhibited alongside other artists, and curated experimental exhibitions. Reaching that proverbial fork on the road after university, he turned his back on conceptualism, took up Zen meditation, and became a social worker in Japan, counseling callers through a suicide hotline. With Orara’s exposure to people’s despair on one hand and embrace of the meditative tenets of Buddhism on the other came a return to making art far removed from conceptual art. It was at this point when the artist started creating small drawings from life - a hummingbird, a vegetable root, a watch.

Orara’s command of the ballpoint pen on small rectangles of paper is impeccable, but this technical mastery is only second fiddle to the very strong presence of his drawings. They evidence not just our physical world but what might be delicate, forlorn, or ephemeral. Taking the time to examine each work, the viewer is easily captivated by the physicality of the drawn object – its age, weight, and uniqueness. This presence is radical in its quiet strength in the face of an art milieu often bombarded by works that are slick and shiny.

Renato Orara is a Philippine-born and New York-based artist whose focus over the last 25 years has been an ongoing series of ballpoint works o paper called Ten Thousand Things that Breathe. His work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe, the United States, and has found its way into private, as welll as museum collections like The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Singapore Art Museum.