Flow, with feelings

Flow is the recent one-man exhibition of fortysomething Joaquin Palencia at the Ayala Museum (currently housed at the old Stock Exchange Bldg. along Ayala Ave., until the new building is finished at the Greenbelt Mall).

His 23rd solo show so far, Palencia’s new series of abstractions using acrylic paint on canvas maximizes that medium’s versatility in being thinned to watercolor-like finesse, while still carrying the heavy body that can also characterize oil paint – without the unpleasant fumes that go with oil.

The result is a set of paintings that segue from heavy impastos to the lightest gossamers of wash imbibed with Palencia’s own trademark color combinations of red, yellow, orange, green and blue. It is a bit like Morris Louis meeting Helen Frankenthaler, with a little Richard Diebenkorn thrown in on the side – though all of this would sound like Greek to those who, like Palencia, work intuitively and with feeling rather than going "by the book" (as in copy, baby, from the coffee table art book). Rather, Palencia shows the true spirit in which abstract painting – that by now well-bought variety that artistic newcomers mistake for free dinner – should always imbibe, a measure of sagacity and probity mixed with a lot of self-depreciation, and a willingness to go beyond the tired formulas that may assure the piggy bank, but is painful for the eyes.

This is not to say that Joaquin has no experience in making "real" paintings. His commissioned works for the Captain’s Bar at the Mandarin Oriental and the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel Makati should lay rest to that. Rather, acting like any true artist who wants to respond emotionally with his work, he has gone beyond the tired conventions of formulaic repetition to always discover a new medium, or a new way of expressing a medium.

Since 1983, the UP graduate had forsaken the conventional, potentially humdrum life of a physician to explore his artistic personae without fearing the consequences of rejection or alienation. This has resulted in a myriad number of pieces in various media, among them terra cotta, which fascinates Palencia for its ability to respond to each touch and direction of the human hand. Mixed media using fabrics is another form that appeals to him.

Primarily, though, painting is another medium that satisfies him because of his subjective responses to paint color, which he applies with not only brush and palette, but with his bare hands, smearing the paint in broad or stippled gestures on the canvas and bonding his thoughts with its form.

It is his belief that every composition should be instantaneous and intuitive – hence, no preparatory sketches are made ("It takes away the energy of the primary thought," he explains), and works directly on canvas, capturing every instance of his thought-making process in color.

He allows a dynamic interplay of ground and paint to show through, proving that painting is, after all, an interaction between pigment and canvas, and that the ground is an equal influence in the determination of the finished look. Running through a repertoire of thoughts and emotions, he lets his ideas run through a standard number of 15 to 20 pieces before he feels that it’s enough, and that it’s time to move on.

This pre-determined volume is not arrived at arbitrarily, of course, but through a by now disciplined, 20-year-long practice of pre-cognition of conceptual limits – if it’s enough, then it’s enough, there’s no need to labor on when the point is made.

The same themes, however, are often revisited by Palencia time and time again: Color-field abstractions with heavy impastos, thinly washed layers of paint building up into curtains of light and vibrant color, human figures and still lifes as counter-posed elements that reconnect Palencia to a tradition of intuitive genre artmaking. What this means is that Joaquin simply recourses through figure and flower painting as a practice of intuitive composition and color-field formation that is unlike an old master’s approach to landscape or still-life as inherently "art for art’s sake," meaning, for example, that a landscape is a painting of a landscape, period. Many artists have made this previous practice, and is often mistaken for being trapped by it. Rather, we should remove the notion that there is something to look for in a painting, but instead how does a painting relate to me?

In this regard, Joaquin Palencia is in veteran company, made more exclusive by his refusal to bow to market pressure and make his work "commerciable." He is obviously happy with what he does, and he does not care who buys his work. The important thing to him is does it make me happy?