Alfredo Esquillo: Transfigurations
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Alfredo Esquillo at Arndt Berlin, 2015.
Alfredo Esquillo presents new paintings for his first solo exhibition in Berlin. Transfigurations consistently refers to a thoughtful body of work that identifies the artist's masterful painting techniques and how he reconfigures an iconography of critical stances an individual takes in a society of duplicity and discord. This exhibition aligns with notions of personal evolution and the temporal allusion to such. Symbols that anchor this phenomenon of becoming are metaphorically tended towards an impression of spirituality and a personal esoteric. Recurring images of sky and flame transists through Esquillo's image-sequences through portraits that are likewise in motion, breaking the static essence of a painting bound by the non-dynamisn of its singular dimension.
Often affiliated with the lineage of artists in the Philippines that portrays a rhetoric around societal discord that besiege the politically conscious Filipino, Esquillo unearths the cultural ironies in the practice of faith and politics of his milieu. The artist, however, relates to this conjecture of personal and social in the self-referential criticality of his practice. As a political stance, and a practice of faith, Esquillo’s paintings are always prodding towards an issue of universality experienced through how personal affairs run parallel to a society at odds with itself.
Alfredo Esquillo (b. 1972, Philippines) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Philippines in 1993. His practice and talent have been recognized early into his career, through the ASEAN Art Awards (Indonesia, 1995 and Thailand, 1996), the Philippine Art Awards in 1996 and in the national recognition of the Thirteen Artists Awards from the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in 2000. Exhibitions in Asian Art Museum and Whitney Museum (USA), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Vargas Museum, Cultural Center of the Philippines (Philippines) and National Portrait Gallery (Australia) have included his works to survey trajectories in contemporary art histories. Esquillo’s solo exhibition history has been steadfast with new works. The last few years presented fresh series in venues such as Tin-aw Art Gallery, Finale Art File (Philippines) and Valentine Willie Fine Art (Singapore), and through platforms like Art Stage Singapore and Artissima International Fair of Contemporary Art (Italy).