Text by Marv Recinto
MONO8 presents CCxLL, a two-person exhibition featuring the works of artists Clarence Chun and Luis Lorenzana. A zine will be published on the occasion of the exhibition with an essay written by London-based art critic Marv Recinto.
CCxLL opened on 16 October at MONO8’s Manila location (BLK 113, 53 Connecticut Street, Greenhills, San Juan City) and runs through 24 November.
CCxLL presents the works of visual artists Clarence Chun and Luis Lorenzana in conversation for the first time. The two painters will also unveil their very first collaborative series in which their respective approaches to the same painterly queries – composition, form, technique, color – coalesce on shared canvases.
In Chun’s paintings, the artist is interested in pushing the boundaries of technique by visualising speed and time. His multi-stage process of washing, masking, and detailing his canvases manifest in sweeping bands of colour that suggest momentum and direction. Chun’s abstractions articulate memories from his life, pop culture references, and broader art histories of modernism.
Within Lorenzana’s work, there is a similar preoccupation with challenging painting’s traditions. The Heads series particularly plays upon portraiture’s art historical tradition. Here, Lorenzana builds upon the genre’s mimetic convention, stripping down, warping, and rebuilding the sitter until they are totally abstracted. Chun and Lorenzana’s joint works, in turn, riff on one another’s exploratory strategies. The resulting compositions push the potential of painting as a medium and coalesce in works that are simultaneously elegant, intricate, and rife with meaning.
Clarence Chun (b.1975 Tacloban; lives and works between Manila and Honolulu) primarily works in abstraction to reveal narratives hinged on the artist’s relationship with the places he had lived, particularly the influence of the bodies of water as a dominant force in his dynamic approach to image-making. Chun meticulously executes compositions that characterize his ability to visually articulate a momentum — narrating the speed of waves and currents of seas, oceans, and rivers as he reflects on the lives he had lived near them. In 1999, Chun was awarded the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale University School of Art and had later received his BFA in Painting (cum laude) from the University of Houston School of Art and his MFA in Painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Chun also received the John Young Artist Award from the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2013. His works have been exhibited widely in Southeast Asia, in the United States, and in Europe and are also in the permanent collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art (USA), Hawai’i State Art Museum (USA), and National Museum of Fine Arts (Manila, PH). His works have been presented at Art Dubai (2022), Dallas Art Fair (2022), S.E.A. Focus (2024), and Art Fair Philippines (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).
Luis Lorenzana (b.1979 Manila; lives and works in Manila) started his artistic practice working with illustration. He then went on to learn painting by studying some of the world’s most important artworks housed in major institutions. While his early works reflected socio-political aspects informed by his experience working at the Philippine Senate, his recent works tread more on formalist approaches in the deconstruction and construction of profiles through portraiture anchored in abstraction and pop surrealism. Lorenzana’s works were featured in solo and group exhibitions in Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, and the United States. He was a finalist in the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards, the International Book Illustration Competitions, and the Metrobank Art and Design Excellence (MADE) Awards. In 2020, the Katzen Arts Center at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., presented his first solo institutional exhibition.
For more information, contact inquiry@mono8gallery.com and +63 9627248131
