MYRIAD: THE STATE OF IN-BETWEEN
“Myriad,” Lean Reboja’s current art exhibit at the Qube Gallery, is, in the gallery’s blurb, an illustration of “the inbetweens of an artist’s journey and the complexities of the human psyche.” In an interview, the artist explains that the exhibit is his take on “the riddles,” the opposites of life–sadness/ happiness; to move on or not; a state of confusion of where to go from wherever one is.”
The titles of his works certainly explain the “in-betweenness” he seeks to convey: “A Call for Help,” “A Bystander to the Flow,” “Contingencies Over Failures,” “False Routes, True Destinations,” “Fortitude,” “Good Old Ties,” “Rekindled,” ”Suffer in Silence,” “The Man at the Door” and “The Stars Don’t Work for Me. Perseverance Does.” The titles also help the viewer to figure out what the painting is all about. As he described his art, “They do not readily give their message. The idea is not apparent or transparent. The viewer will have to figure out what it is all about.”
His works seem to be filled with myriad elements that show the complexities of the human psyche, the human soul. And pop surrealism seems to be the perfect venue for the outpouring of his ideas on canvas. It is a style he prefers to realism which limits the artist’s vision to what he actually sees while with pop surrealism, “there is no limitation as to how a viewer looks at it (the painting),” and no limitation as to how he, the artist, wants to express his ideas for the painting. There are a lot of flame-like elements in all of his works, for example, and he says these flames represent passion.
His canvases are peopled with comic strip-like characters which represent real people, his family and friends who know who they are in the canvases in “Myriad.” His parents, for example, are the couple sitting on a settee at the right bottom corner of the painting named “The Light and the Pillar,” with his mother as the light and his father as the pillar. His artist friends are in “A Fleet of Dreams.”
Lean Reboja wanted to take up medicine. It was his mother who encouraged him to take up fine arts instead and it seems her instincts were/are right. “Myriad” is his fourth solo exhibit at the Qube Gallery. There are 13 paintings in the exhibit, a number which, he says, means bad luck to most people but which he would like to make the number do the reverse for him, to make 13 lucky for him.
Reboja says the exhibit somehow mirrors his own self: in a state of “making something out of uncertainty,” but even if he is at that stage, he affirms, “I am still productive.”
The exhibit will run until Oct. 26. /