Power: A culture crash
Every now and then, Cebu’s visual arts scene encounters creative presentations that embody the “culture crash” phenomenon – yes, kind of cross-culture amalgamations.
One such exhibit recently took place at Qube Gallery in The Crossroads, Banilad. It was a show which featured artworks by French painter Henri Lamy. Titled “Power,” the exhibit brought Lamy’s aesthetic ideals center stage.
Mainlined by pieces that were molded by the principles of figurative art merged with the process-oriented inclinations of expressionism, the show went beyond focalizing how Cebu appears to the eyes of a foreigner – it went further to show how cordial and how estranged those views are with those of local talents’.
Lamy is an admirer of American expressionist Jackson Pollack, and his “Power” indicates where he has brought that admiration to as an artist who crafts figurative pieces that are executed by unpredictable points in process-oriented standards.
He expands this creative merger in incorporating his passion for capoeira (a Brazilian martial art that merges dance, acrobatics, music and fighting) into his workflow – resulting in works that embody representational art and abstraction that’s imbued with the fluidity of kinesthetic motion.
Like most artists who are not from the Philippines, Lamy chose Cebu’s backstreets, crowded markets and places of worship as the subjects for his show. He immersed himself in Cebu’s signs-of-the-times in his goal to set the spotlight on the everyman Cebuano, in the process implementing his blend of figurative-cum-expressionist art.
All in all, “Power” presented art by a French man who captured Cebu in wall-bound tableaus as he saw it, utilizing an art-making technique mastered by the Italians and an art-making style which saw to the popularity of one of America’s famous abstractionists; both physically done by incorporating a martial art from that hails from Brazil.