Silverlens

Maria Taniguchi

Opening Reception: 17 January, Fri, 6-9pm

Maria Taniguchi’s work develops from an interest in organizational structures. Her practice evolves in parallel strands. On one hand she narrows down on methodology by utilizing techniques of image processing, series and repetition. Over the past five years, she has produced a series of large paintings that arrange a consistent pattern into different surface configurations, considering the possibilities within a seemingly neutral composition.

Maria Taniguchi Curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana

Maria Taniguchi is an artist who has concerned herself with art as the materiality of the thing-itself. Through this she has explored, almost unrestricted, various materials and objects through forms as diverse as pottery and video. When it comes to the old artistic medium of painting on canvas, her continued exploration of the materiality of the subject—its place in time, in history, in our visual compendium—does not cease and often the result is a massive piece of entity without a traceable subject matter and is instead embedded with a kind of distributed process which makes it hard to distinguish whether what we have before us is a painted image or a piece of constructed object.

Maria Taniguchi took up Sculpture in the University of the Philippines' College of Fine Arts, and continued her education in Goldsmiths, London to pursue her Master's Degree in Fine Arts. From a lone painting entitled O (6,000 painted bricks) which stood ten feet tall inside a gallery at her MFA show in Goldsmiths, London in 2009, Maria Taniguchi's continued exploration of large, monochromatic paintings resembling brickwork have made it into several galleries around the world particularly in her homeland, in the Philippines at Silverlens Gallery in Makati; in Art Basel's Art Statements in Switzerland last year; and most recently, in Amman, Jordan for an artist-in-residence program.  The tall, towering edifices looming in either width or height have become a prevailing structure for Taniguchi's now untitled series of paintings designed after a particular line scheme: the transversely coordinated rectangular blocks that resemble pieces of bricks that make up a wall. And these walls have become stark representations to Taniguchi's ideas about art—methodical constructions and re-constructions. These walls have continued to pervade gallery walls to leave us only with a kind of imprint, a remnant of Taniguchi's almost in-traceable subject/content via her more structural art-method.

The qualities of Maria Taniguchi's brick paintings which will be shown in (Silverlens Gallery in Gillman Barracks, Singapore/Art Stage, Singapore) may seem to denote blankness, absence, or a muted expression. Her fastidiously rendered, large-scale 'brick' paintings serve as a starting point, as a locus for her ideas on construction/production. It is an accumulation of manners that builds into a fortress. She sees it not as a surface of expression but as an armature, a basic ground that supports her ideas toward art. But through its demanding scale and rigid discipline it permeates a presence which we can decipher by looking at it directly and unceremoniously, as self-effacing as the artwork itself, void of  our preconceived visual  locutions to be able to ride the harmony of chance, the euphony of process, and the melody of the surface's interaction.