Ayala Tower One Fountain Area
Brash, frenetic, and experimental, the paintings of Wyndelle Remonde look, at first glance, thoroughly at home in the vivid, hyper
Brash, frenetic, and experimental, the paintings of Wyndelle Remonde look, at first glance, thoroughly at home in the vivid, hyper saturated screens of social media. Referencing a wild variety of artistic expressions—graphic design, textile printing, animation, and street art—the works deliver an amalgam of images that are at once personal and social, at once symbolic and surreal. Like the sudden awareness of the world’s infinite variety, they bring the viewer to a direct confrontation of the artist’s thoughts and emotions, all commingling as recurrent icons, surprising visual elements, psychedelic jolts of color.
While one may easily be intrigued by and drawn into Remonde’s hypnotic fabulations, they evoke a story as old as time: the journey of the self in search of identity, a reckoning of personal illness and loss, a stark awareness of the world’s vulgar inequalities. Through a deft maneuvering of when to use the various materials of his craft (acrylic, textile paint, aerosol, and pastel), the artist reveals his insights on himself and his environment, employing Juan Kugihan (Juan Masipag), a character of anthropomorphized carabao, as a form of self-iconography.
For this art fair offering, the artist from Cebu presents his take on recent tragedies, such as the pandemic and the devastation of typhoon Odette, and how they have prompted the artist to examine the various relationships that connect the individual to the world. Thoughts float out of the head as bands of colors; the heart is revealed as a marker of stamina; Hokusai waves foretell the coming of a catastrophe. A swagger (or more accurately a foolhardy fearlessness) characterizes his works, which may have come from having stared at death in the face and lived to tell the tale.
Remonde’s paintings, though they may work well with the sophisticated monitors of technology, present a richness in form and content that doesn’t lend well to paraphrasing. At the heart of what the artist does is an exploration of the human condition, in particular the pathos of everyday living, which aligns the artist to those who came before him and, by painting, asks what it means to be alive in the world.
Words by Carlomar Daoana
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