About the Event
Celebrating a decade of representation with Silverlens, we are pleased to announce Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s fifth show with the gallery, Still Life. Her Death to the Major, Viva Minor (2008) was the inaugural exhibition of SLab, Silverlens’ second gallery. An award-winning artist, she is known for her works of different mediums and disciplines, exploring the integrity and vanity of objects. In Still Life, Eustaquio revisits the idea of art-historical still life works and their implications, alluding to contemporary martyrs of human excess and appetite. She continues exploring materials, objects, and fascination of the impulse to create, consume, and destroy while echoing her past show, Swine (2004), dwelling on appetite and her concerns as a previously avowed vegetarian. (DD)
In 2003, I worked on a piece called Martyr A la Carte that featured a duck made out of fabric hanging from a hook and mounted on a decorative frame, and a jacquard-upholstered panel. The two soft reliefs formed a diptych on which I sewed the words, Martyr A la Carte. This work eventually became the anchor piece of a group of works that made up Swine, an installation that I worked on at Green Papaya Art Projects.
The space was cast in a red light from a neon piece, She would kill for it, and strewn around the room were other objects I spawned out of fabric, wax and found objects. It was fashioned to look like a bistro, or a salon, with a wax-covered chair, an upholstered refrigerator, a white wax apron dripping with red petals, a butcher’s knife, a pig’s leg, and finally, an oil painting portrait of a pig somewhere around this grouping.
More than the memento mori, the inevitability of death that art’s Golden Age of still life paintings allude to, I have always been struck by the excesses depicted in these works, and by what such excesses imply. There was banquet and bacchanalia. There were bowls of fruit, golden goblets of wine, and various game and cooked meats. Such great appetites were heightened by realism put on display by the painters of the time who were exploring the new medium of oil, and these paintings could only be commissioned by the wealthy. While the slaughtered meats are the apparent martyrs of these excesses, the real martyrs were a great distance away, in the Americas and in the islands of the Pacific including the Philippines.
Behind the material successes of the sixteenth century West was an engine for building such wealth: empire. Thousands of trees from the Philippine tropical forests were felled as hundreds of ships, built in the shipyards of Cavite, were sent out for the Galleon Trade. Gold, silk, fruits, vegetables and plants sailed to Europe and changed European cuisine forever, as tomatoes, potatoes, corn and bananas found their way to the continent from the Americas. (How different our diets would have been if french fries and spaghetti bolognese were never invented then!)
Still Life revisits the idea of these art-historical still life works and their social implications, while alluding to the more contemporary martyrs of human excess and appetite. A grouping of works that echo Swine, the show continues on my art practice of exploring materials and objects and fascination with our impulse to create, consume and destroy.
- Patricia Perez Eustaquio
Still Life will be on view from 26 October to 25 November 2017 alongside Syaiful Garibaldi’s exhibition, Limaciform, at Silverlens, 2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati City. For inquiries, contact info@silverlensgalleries.com or +63917-587-4011.