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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Tuesday, November 19, 2024

entry arrow9:24 PM | Copycat by Idwardo



Often, when I go and see exhibitions in town, I turn off the pesky part of my brain that allows voices uttering art theory, and art history, and art techniques, and just feel around the gallery and be drawn to the one object that I cannot shake. In the Arté Café Gallery [ IG: @artegalleryph ] exhibit, PREKARYATSII, now showing at the Arts and Design Collective Dumaguete [ IG: @adcdumaguete ], this happens to be “Copycat,” a work in acrylic by Cebu artist Idwardo. There’s something vaguely cinematic about it, like a piece of color film stripped to its basic Technicolor separations, which render the subject — a young man in an Asian squat staring straight at the viewer — both mysterious and compelling, rendered as he is in rainbow basics. That his “copies” in the other colors show different facets of himself — one faceless and the other grotesquely masked — also lend to this mystery, signifying some subtext of horror. There’s an interactive quality to the art as well: when you take the invitation to scan the QR code beside it, your cellphone screen immediately becomes a camera that has settings making each figure pop out more prominently. It’s quite a nice addendum to the exercise, but I like the tripartite nature of the painting itself: our selves in three iterations, guises of who we are, staring straight at life [or the viewer] with a somber, even steely gaze. I wonder what he thinks of me, this young man in a squat in three colors. I wonder why he stares so.

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