ISABEL CUENCA: "TWO PAINTINGS"
"Untitled"
Acrylic on canvas
48x48 in
2018
"Untitled"
Acrylic on canvas
40x34 in
2016
Acrylic on canvas
40x34 in
2016
INTERVIEW
Eileen Tabios (ET): I love your paintings of these edged abstractions. It’s hard for me to articulate why but I think it’s because they seem transparent and yet are not. For instance, they offer an architectural sense and yet the physics of the images might not allow them to stand up were they actually built 3-dimensionally, which is to say, they can hold together viably only if components are in parallel universes — an impression that pleases me. Am I being too flakey? Anyway, I’d like to know more about the background of how you developed this series — you go back to at least 2011 doing such works (based on your website). How/when did you begin doing these works and since you seem to have spent years at it, what have you learned/discovered during this time?
When I first started to paint, I had no real background of art history. I just told myself that if I were to be a painter I was going to strive to be da Vinci. I was going to tackle graceful realism—and I struggled. It wasn’t until we had to do a project in my undergrad painting class that I was introduced to geometric abstraction. This, I understood. I can’t articulate why or how but it was like a lightning strike moment.
It was very early on that I learned how to make “landscapes” with lines and colors. I have one piece from around the 2011 year that my mom describes as an airport. Between then and now, I’ve tried to have more focus and be more intentional. I’ve been a little bit more experimental as well. I’ve dabbled in wall installations and created sculptures in the language of geometric abstraction. They were attempts to see if these structures I portrayed in paintings can exist in our world—that needs more investigation at some point.
IC: Buildings are a really big influence. I look at every stage of how a building is constructed, how it falls apart and I read a little bit of architectural theories—of how that drives the way they approach nature and placement of rooms. I have an ever growing painting resource folder and I collect everything from corals to images of crystals to fashion. I think fashion is very interesting because of the idea of suspension. Clothing can flow or have a structure but either way, while we wear them they are floating. I think artists like David Schnell, Michael Taylor, Ulf Puder, and Frank Lloyd Wright have shown me some of the possibilities of how to hone geometric abstraction.
ET: I sense the art historical references in these works, but I was quite taken when I read somewhere (can’t recall) that these are also inspired by your childhood immigrant experiences, specifically living in small spaces of apartments. Please share more about this backdrop and how it came to appear in your paintings.
IC: I think it was in an email conversation between the two of us that I mentioned this, and I didn’t know how the experience of eleven people living in a one-bedroom apartment has a lasting effect on maybe my subconscious or just on me. I say subconscious because I don’t think I’ve intentionally approached creating a painting with that moment in mind. It seeps in, in a way that I talk about large commercial space as intimate space. The spaces I create are stripped and bare and yet they’re not exactly that. I think this is something I am still working out.
ET: Can you discuss your choice of colors and their tones, including psychological tones. By the latter, I mean that even when you use bright colors (pink, orange, a blue like the proverbial sea), there still seems a mutedness across the image…
IC: I can’t take the full credit of the color choices. It is a collaboration between me and the painting. I find that I can’t force it to be what I want it to be completely. I constantly have to be fluid. The soft mutedness I think comes a little from having a baseline. They are the moments of comfort and then the sharper colors mingle in which shocks a little. This is an interesting question because I want to add another element to the idea of collaboration. For most of my practice I work here in the US—I learned my craft here and in a system I understand. I did a residency in the Philippines a few years ago and after spending three months in my hometown what came out of me was a very saturated collection of works. Bright reds with deep violets. When I had them all together on white walls, I was shocked.
ET: Where was the residency and can you expand on how you translated your Philippine experience into one of vibrant colors? Was it the environment of the place where you were residing? Something more psychological, including perhaps the people…? In short, how do you think you come out with such vibrant or saturated colors?
IC: The residency was at my hometown – Bacolod City, Negros Occ. Philippines. This was my first time traveling back home after fifteen years. I left the city at a time when my generation was trying to find their place in society. So going back, I knew that I wouldn't really fit in – I never got the chance. I faded away from friendships, I grew less and less present with familial events, and I focused on surviving.
What I found when I returned home swallowed me up. I was used to working independently, to do things ourselves. Fading away, and being absent took its toll. Everything was saturated--how people got things done affected me, how the system works and not knowing how to ask for the things I needed. What came out of me in terms of my artwork, I think, is probably the most honest way I could have expressed myself. It was the painting that drew it out of me whether I wanted it or not.
IC: The residency was at my hometown – Bacolod City, Negros Occ. Philippines. This was my first time traveling back home after fifteen years. I left the city at a time when my generation was trying to find their place in society. So going back, I knew that I wouldn't really fit in – I never got the chance. I faded away from friendships, I grew less and less present with familial events, and I focused on surviving.
What I found when I returned home swallowed me up. I was used to working independently, to do things ourselves. Fading away, and being absent took its toll. Everything was saturated--how people got things done affected me, how the system works and not knowing how to ask for the things I needed. What came out of me in terms of my artwork, I think, is probably the most honest way I could have expressed myself. It was the painting that drew it out of me whether I wanted it or not.
ET: I should have started with this question—how did you come to (decide to) be an artist? :)
IC: That isn’t an easy choice to make or that I even made a choice but I know I am committed. During my college career, I was jumping around different majors from nursing to interior design to accounting, and I was going to apply for the architectural program, which required a portfolio. So I thought I’m going to take a painting class and just never left the art building.
I was so very aware of my siblings being so secure about what they wanted to be. They seem to have that string they could follow that is so intertwined with their passions. I don’t know if we are conditioned to think that being an “artist” is something on the side, but it is also undeniable. I knew that if I were to choose to paint, that it required for me to be educated, because I needed to know the “rules” in order to be intentional. Intentional in breaking them and intentional in what I wanted to say.
ET: For recent works I saw the smaller works you recently exhibited with Matt Manalo (“Bayanihan: You, Us, and I” at Inferno Gallery, Rice University, Houston, TX). Can you share something about them, like the directions you were exploring with them. Including, perhaps scale as they’re smaller?
IC: The smaller work related to the gallery space we had, but it isn’t just that. To me smaller works meant facing intimacy. I always worked larger because I think I was desiring that space. If we go back to my experience as an immigrant, living in a one bedroom with eleven people, then it is an easy reach to say I longed for a larger space.
“Untitled (parenthesis no 2)”
Acrylic on canvas
18x24 in
2019
“Untitled (parenthesis no 3)”
Acrylic on canvas
18x24 in
2019
“Untitled (parenthesis no 4)”
Acrylic on canvas
18x24 in
2019
I call them masks because the shape is headlike and I titled them in parenthesis because we are Asians in parenthesis. Whether we are Filipino, Japanese or Indian. We are part of that umbrella and yet we are so vastly different which this set of work recognizes and celebrates.
ET: Thanks, Isabel, for sharing your works and thoughts with North Fork Arts Projects!
Click on all images to enlarge.
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