Painter Carlo Angelo Saavedra calls his new works “imperfect objects”. Outwardly true; the treatment of the paintings is far from standard, e.g. frames, hacked with a dull axe, smeared in paint overflowing the canvas limits, suggested figures emerging from a coat of mud-like mixtures, surfaces abused with the constant process of trial and error.
However, beneath the seeming imperfection of his works, Saavedra holds that his aim is not to deconstruct or to deface. According to the artist, it is quite the opposite. With salvaged pieces of wood and old paintings, Saavedra says that by giving these found objects or subject matters new identities, one still engages in the process of creation. “I’m never iconoclastic”, he says. “The job of a painter is to make a memorable painting, not to vandalize for the sake of temporary provocation.”
And despite a number of people always commenting that his paintings never veer away from the macabre, Saavedra insists that he is above all, optimistic. Inspired by poetry and, what e.e. cummings describes as a fascination with the verb and the movement it creates in language, Saavedra also points out his fascination with the synthetic quality of poetry and how within this idea there resonates something autobiographical.
Quite often these random phrases when taken alone, only conjure a generic event. But, in his idyllic world, Saavedra shows lying beneath the irregularity and the ambiguity of it all, the simple idea that the creator can own the generic and turn it into something personal.
Seemingly, on the walls of the gallery are discarded “relics” which seem fueled by that unexplained angst that people always see in Saavedra’s works. Contrary to that, his works are in fact merely products of his preoccupation with doing things his way - not with a deep irreverence or over conceptualization of art, but with a solitary need to develop a positive autobiographical inspiration, combined with something philosopher Alan Watts described as, “a sense of material competence” needed “to do the fundamental things in life.”
Homemade Relics opens on the 6th of May at Artinformal, 277 Connecticut St., Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City. The exhibit will run until the 20th. For inquiries, call 7258518 or sms 0918-899-2698.
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