Gallery

In the midst of events—this is where Filipino painter Sir Levi Yu would defamiliarizingly begin his every art-making narrative. Into the middle of things—there, the beholders of Yu’s art would ineluctably find themselves “hastened and plunged into” (as Horace would have it). In medias res—here’s where the viewers commence their shuttle along the reception pathway, in search of the painter’s art- and mark-making.

 

For Yu, an artwork is far from being a self-existent matter of fact. It’s definitely not an invention out of nowhere. It is rather a fabric of signs, sign systems, and artistic conventions that the artist has inherited from the past and which, in this case, Yu the artist has chosen to foreground to the spectators. The foregrounding is aimed at defamiliarizing and “alienating” the viewers from the work, to a point that the artwork could occasion an inner speech within the viewers and a dialogic—where an exchange of logic takes place, not only between the beholders and the artwork but also, equally importantly, between the beholders and their individual/collective frame of reference (intellectual as well as psychological).

 

The deconstructionist artist that Yu personifies holds that no matter how gifted and “original” an artist may (appear to) be, his entry point in the grand narrative of art has been “in/into the middle of things” (in medias res). The entry point is always already a reentry point. And the artistic creation has never happened “in the beginning” (no matter how convinced some artists are about their creative act as analogous to a godlike creatio ex nihilo).

 

For Yu, encounters with the works of his artistic predecessors have brought about the impulse to re-locate and re-place and, in turn, the inclination to “paint through” (as John Cage would “write through”) the masters’ strokes as well as their picture space. And the works comprising his Mountain Series—samples of which from the DJB Collection are presented in this exhibition—are his interfusionist productions-reproductions, positions-repositions from the mark-making gestures not only of Arturo Luz but also of Manuel Baldemor, Juvenal Sansó, Jeff Dizon, and his own father, the notable expressionist painter William Yu.

 

A key to understanding Yu’s notion of art lies very close to the motivation behind Horace’s advice to the young poets or makers: for them to carry their readers or audience into the midst of the action in the space of the art-making event. In short, the vision of Yu’s interfusionism is to bring the viewers to witness the different worlds that are presented, represented, and framed within his picture space. The palimpsestic condition of his artwork is, in short, an invitation for the spectators to enter into an inquisitive, dialogic relation with the artwork (and all the intertexts therein).

 

For Yu, the audience of the artwork are central as con-figurers of the artistic creation and its meaning-making event. Every understanding of the artistic text always involves guesswork and inference, and the meaning of an artwork is always plural, unstable, and contextual. And the collaging as well as foregrounding of the influences and intertexts of Yu, right within the painter’s art frame and picture space, carries his strong intention to free the viewers from a circumscribing habit of meaning-making with art, in art—to fixate the meaning of artistic marks in the contexts of their earlier incarnation(s).

 

With his interfusionist art, Yu envisions the emergence of a language among his viewers—one that is at home with ambiguity and which engages the viewers to participate in the generation of possible meanings other than those pre-scribed for the signs when they appeared in their “original” contexts.