How often is often enough? Tan’s Occasional Brilliance
How often is often enough?
Tan’s Occasional Brilliance
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, August 12, 1987
IN HIS just ended solo exhibition at the CCP Small Gallery, recent Bangladesh Biennale medalist Gerry Tan has taken three squared bales of absorbent coir – a coconut fiber commonly used in upholstery – and has suspended them from the ceiling like mock parcels all in a row. Drenched in viscous black tar, the coir continously drips down onto the floor in erratic puddles of inky goo, initiating an interplay of space, time, gravity, volume, materiality and radical graphic counterpoints.
The set-up instantly reminded me of pork asado bristling with oil and hanging drip-dried in a panciteria window, but I did find it irresistibly quaint, visually compelling, and mad enough to ponder. Squared bales echo square cubicle, rigidity yields to viscosity, puddles challenge austere geometry, while mass empties itself onto the floor with gravitational diligence. Who, pray tell, could ask for more?
If only the rest of Tan’s show were that good, we might have been compelled to preserve him in glass and nominate him for sainthood. But, alas, much of the collection is all too human!
Tan’s shaped black paintings on plywood exhibit a textural range from satin-matte to soot-carbonic and alligator, but so do shoes and bags, squid, and dental plaque. They are huge in size but hardly expansive enough, dominated by a quality akin to static cling, much like enormous wool socks begging to be ravaged by lint. Black is the absence of color in the context of light, and the presence of all shades and hues when viewed in the context of pigment, and Tan does little or nothing to explore this duality, nor even to exploit black’s inherent visual and philosophical nuances.
On the other hand, Tan’s textile installations resemble ragged cruciforms, or sinful black undies tumble-dried on black towels. A large swatch of silk is pinned onto a larger swatch of leatherette, for instance, causing one textural quantity to recede and the other to emerge – all with some difficulty. There are times when pleading the intellect is not nearly enough, and sadly, these are among them.
The late Ray Albano – who personally hand-picked Gerry Tan for the Fukuoka and Bangladesh events – often described him as a “deadline painter,” or one who accomplishes much of his work on curatorial order and in a jiffy. I am sure there is value to that as well, and this almost certainly precludes a talent for pressure-packed produce that is a rare gift indeed. But this also precludes a batting-average based on the principle of “hit or miss,” and in this particular exhibit, Tan’s aim is both good and bad.
Gerry Tan is a gifted young painter, that much we know. In at least one out of every ten trys.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “How often is often enough? Tan’s Occasional Brilliance” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, August 12, 1987
