AUGURIES OF GRACE
On Allan Balisi’s “A Thousand Brighter Mornings”
In “A Thousand Brighter Mornings”, Allan Balisi approaches his artistic practice with a renewed sense of self. For this solo show – his first for this year – he veers away from thematic intention, letting his style become the conjunction between the different pieces. This liberation from the requirement of conceptual coherence produces an effervescent quality in these new works, providing a certain lightness to his usual themes of longing.
The title of the exhibit is lifted from Gerald Salonga’s poem of the same name, written in March 2015 when Salonga was a political detainee in Nueva Ecija. The poem delicately opens with the existential capacity of the ordinary, as objects of daily living become mirrors of our own personal terrain. Much like the poem of reference, Balisi’s canvases depict light as they bounce gently through mundane scenes. It is light that softly highlights the fingers pointing to a page. It is light that washes out the circumambient foliage into a safe haven. It is light that slowly bathes a burnt-down church when the smoke finally clears. In fixating on these instances of clarity, the artist elegantly examines life through objects that the light casts itself upon.
Balisi’s ability to capture illumination is underscored in each of the works from the exhibit. From the refractions rendered in Responses (2024) to the photographic flash outlining each of the lovebirds’ feathers in Warfare (2024), he harnesses a deep understanding of the qualities that light imparts to a certain material. These images are then carefully translated to the canvas through translucent layers of oil paint, leaving behind areas of gradual desaturation. This specific technique employed by the artist gives way to the importance of the negative in the portrayal of light. Through his skilled hands, areas that are relatively devoid of color explore the range between tender and puissant, as rays of sunlight compassionately cascade down towards the church ruins depicted in Heavenly (2024) or burst through the warm orange clouds in We Won’t Fear (2024).
Even in the chromatically darker canvases, the shadows give way to experience how the banal is limned. In Lost, Balanced, and Lucid (2024), lovers are caught in a close embrace as they are held mid-sway. The lead’s hand at the small of the follow’s back gently pulls a tucked shirt upward. It’s a small intimacy that would have been missed if the scene had been carried out to completion. The detailed yet dilute washes of green, blue, and old rose, provide a softness in this minute act. In contrast, the same three colors suffuse the stem hairs in Guided by Branches (2024). The painting is captivatingly dimensional, as it captures even the smallest sliver from the brief flash of light on its farthest branch. As the light touches everything, there’s a vulnerability being unmasked by being made visible.
Visible is the man hiding calmly in the verdant trench in From The Frontline (2024). And visible is the pointed text about formal withdrawal in Home Stretch (2024). These two works seem to depict the dialogic, with a conversation ensuing in each of their confines. The man’s right hand in Frontline moves out of purview as if reaching backward to a person we couldn’t see. Similarly, the copy of NOW by the Invisible Committee faces an individual who’s not depicted on canvas. These framing devices feel filmic as if guiding the viewer to focus on small acts. One couldn’t help but come closer to examine each blade of grass and bulging vein. It is in the implied nearness of the characters that exist within and outside of the canvases that Balisi is able to register intimacy within the constraints of the paintings.
In a speech, Photojournalist Pablo Corral Vega once said that “When we allow ourselves to observe the political dimension of intimacy, we are forced to be unabashed defenders of tenderness, of consent.” The same allowance is observed in the artist’s works, as they transmute political scenarios into deeply personal encounters. Through them, we get to witness how any form of struggle is inherently communal and inextricably intimate. Care – being an
act of intimacy – in this context of shared struggle becomes important to the point that it is radical. One can view the creation of this series of paintings as a radical act of care. That in the depiction of refracted light and physical touch, viewers get to understand how objects can become testaments to grace. That despite the pathos that exists in prolonged situations and still objects, we are able to hold an awareness of transience and quiet existence. Balisi has been quite adept in reproducing potent sentimentality throughout his practice. The only difference now is that instead of holding moments short of their breaking points or keeping viewers in a state of suspended breath, he guides the viewer slowly, gently, through the awaited exhale.
POSTSCRIPT: Liminality and restraint are not foreign devices in many of Balisi’s visual rhetoric. In the accompanying zine from this exhibition, entitled PAINTING STUDY: AFTER CRASH, greyscale illustrations of the unwavering urban landscape move towards depictions of nature. It carries with it the same awareness of the transience of space he employs in his works. It’s akin to the hostile territories where love flourishes that Audre Lorde once described. The small piece, Leanings (All of Our Little Worlds) (2024) gets to close the exhibit, as ink bleeding from an inkjet print explodes into a granular cosmos, tender and full of possibility.
Dondie Casanova
