Patrick de Veyra’s Storm in a Teacup is a way of working through the collective experience of the present, particularly in how we respond to our environment. Amidst an overwhelming deluge of information and stimuli, our perceptions expand and stretch, potentially into infinity.
De Veyra’s first solo show at West Gallery, Assault & Retrieve, took place in 2005. An extension of his thesis exhibition at the UP College of Fine Arts, Assault & Retrieve featured a collection of acrylic collages, where new imagery was created due to erasing, obscuring, modifying his own drawings with gestural brushstrokes.
Having grown up within the compound of his grandfather’s printing press, where the output was prescriptive and mechanical, de Veyra felt compelled to disrupt and challenge the repetition and rhythm of these processes. By “assaulting” the printed images and “retrieving” the fragments, he was addressing what he calls “visual tolerance”: situating these images in a new context and reimagining them within a new scope and perspective, to see them anew.
In a similar vein, de Veyra’s process for Storm in a Teacup involves the appropriation of images collected from open access databases of art institutions into his work. Drawing from art history, he hones into imagery dealing with themes of the passage of time and the preservation of memory, among them fragmented sculptures of human heads and hands, and ravens. These images are extracted and isolated from these databases, transferred onto a canvas through emulsion, layered with paint, with more imagery transferred onto these layers of paint. The emulsion transfers are suspended between layers of paint, hovering between fluid, porous space, emphasising the fluidity between image and form.
The pieces in this collection carry the atmosphere and quality of water in motion. Beyond the gestures of the brush and marks, however, lie reflections on the hyperstimulation we encounter today. By combining the printed material — in its mechanical, hyper-real copies upon copies — and the very personal renderings of the human hand, de Veyra explores the tension between these two aesthetically disparate expressions, engaging them in dialogue to create a picture that speaks with both the materiality of the paint and emulsion, and the meaning of the images, whether inherent or ascribed.
Each layer is a foundation upon which a different layer is contextualised, creating a new visual language within the composition, a way of making sense of the volume of information we encounter everyday.
Exhibition Notes by Carina Reyes Santos