Silverlens Gallery is proud to present The Quality of Sunlight is a Filter Through Which Our Thoughts and Feelings Pass, a solo exhibit by Catalina Africa featuring a multi-media installation of paintings, objects, and video that explore the genre of landscape painting reconfigured into the artist’s unique visual language of patterned abstraction along with a personal narrative of illumination inspired by life near the sea.

Two monumental paintings, A View From The Womb and The Ability to Stay Close to the Source of Energy - both collaborative works with the artist’s daughter Yana, stand on the floor propped alongside each other forming a wide perpendicular screen with a gap in the middle that invites the viewer to pass through like a welcoming portal. Laying on the floor as well just in front is a pair of feet made of mirrors. Ensconced behind this interface is Catalina Africa’s provisional studio inside the gallery (Collection from Artist’s Studio). There you will find: warm spotlight from a lamp fastened on wooden limbs made from what remains of a tree, hanging along it is a dress of floral design and alteration, a red chair, a portable folding table with a green desktop where sits a DVD player showing a surfer gliding along the crest of a wave, and finally, behind this desk and on the wall is a large digital print on tarpaulin that is outlined by a rope of lights. This piece is taken from a much larger whole that once stretched across the gallery space from a previous exhibit which served as a dissecting wall, but for purposes of passage perhaps, a doorway was cut into the tarpaulin partition. Printed on this is an image of what appears to be the side of a rocky cliff near the beach, and where located in this picture are green paper sculptures with one shaped as a door - once more, plus other collage cutouts and detritus, which following the drawing of an arrow, includes a miniature painting by the artist.

Put in a nutshell, this installation encapsulates Africa’s artistic verve for expanding the boundaries of painting into the territory of livable space, producing the myriad nuances of thought and emotion afforded by painting into impressions of color, light, and texture applied in various expression, dimension, material, form, or scale, whilst negotiating the local with the global, information for experience, identity and community. The world defined as painting she would seem to state. Painting today is compelled to confront the encroaching frontiers of contemporary life and the burgeoning world that we live in where the everyday consists of the spectacle of consumer culture, instantaneous communication and information overload, the mutation of social norms, or the eclipse of the real in lieu of automated environments. Nature itself is questioned in terms of what we think of it, our responses made to satisfy cultural conventions. Catalina Africa’s exhibit gathers the breadth of this wide world in terms of painting and pushes it outside of its comfort zone as a two-dimensional representational window, and pits the space that we inhabit as expanded field of painting, a new terrain of sensations.

Thus, Africa sets her work inside the gallery following the organic flow between nature and art ideal to the studio habitat she relishes at home near the beach. In this domain, the artist broadens the reach of the imagination to painted objects aggregated for anthropomorphic effect in harmony with the rituals of creativity (Rainbow Making Strategies 7). In such a way that the painting, The Quality of Sunlight is a Filter Through Which our Thoughts and Feelings Pass, traverses the length of a backyard garden, where right in the thick of it is a shimmering screen that seems to embrace the whole picture, intimating a gesture towards Minimalism, if not from another perspective, to grow outside of it’s boundary like an emanating magnetic field that may occupy seemingly empty space yet still affect things from a distance: i.e., painting. This work is also unbound from the wall, and off the easel, is freestanding, with another bare brace in front of the painting that invites the viewer to suspend disbelief, and to cross the threshold of representational space and experience pure wonder and joy through art – that unfettered passage of illumination one seeks. Each thing and artistic composition resonates a profound discovery for astonishment and personal meaning, as if these would represent a microcosm of the universe, heaven in the grain of a sand. Entering the installation therefore means to dwell into the artist’s mind, sharing her engagement with painting in how her medium could explore states of pure being, of authenticity and poetic expression, while addressing artistic tactics of deconstruction and plurality, amidst the overwhelming contemporary condition of commodity culture and spectacle.

The artist inspired by the landscape around her furthermore reimagines the space of her painting into a labyrinth of caverns and enveloping corners (Testing the Permeability of a Rock Wall), womb-like for their depth and mystery, a complex for exploring artistic consciousness. She states, “Inevitably it is about painting - a continuous refinement of my relationship to it, thus making akin the process of painting to the process of self-discovery.” In staging presence, the artist signs with a handprint echoing man’s first consciousness inside the cave several millennia ago, a way of performing magic to control destiny. Africa filters the rarefied air of her world with diagrammatic zones of emotional and imaginative power - dream mazes apparently, at certain times aided by the pure spirit of a child, the artist’s daughter (A View From The Womb - collaboration with Yana), in making these pictures with the weight of authenticity. In another instance (A Sensual Experience of Myself in Sand, in Time), the artist’s whole being seems to dissolve into atomic composition while experiencing the sensuousness of time, lying in the sand, into a state of bliss - a means of “translating emotional states into direct visual experience.” Catalina Africa’s search for the authentic provides a unique style of painting towards ecstatic states of abstraction, followed by a rendition of the world without regard for the ordinary, in visionary fashion, filtering the ephemeral from the infinite.

Words by Arvin Flores

Catalina Africa‘s (b. 1988, Manila) work ranges across a variety of media which include painting, video, installation, photography, and music. She whimsically combines both painting and installation to produce serendipitous encounters within everyday life. Simulated and sensate, these environments temporarily transcend the boundaries implied by the exhibition space and evoke more fleeting memories, worlds, and words.

Africa is a graduate of the University of the Philippines under the Fine Arts Painting Program. She has held residencies at 1335 Mabini, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Dicasalarin Artist Village, and has an upcoming residency at TRADES AiR in Hawaii. Aside from being an active participant in the local art scene for more than 10 years, her work has also been exhibited in Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, and Hong Kong.