Topaz Arts presents 500 Years After Guernica

TOPAZ ARTS presents
500 Years After Guernica
an exhibition of new collaborative paintings by Manuel Ocampo and Irene-Iré
curated by Todd B. Richmond and Paz Tanjuaquio

on view March 3 to April 28, 2018
opening reception with the artists: Saturday, March 3, 3-6pm
at TOPAZ ARTS, 55-03 39th Avenue in Queens > directions

500 Years After Guernica is an exhibition of new collaborative paintings by Manuel Ocampo and Irene-Iré. For this show at Topaz Arts, the series of paintings focus on imagery culled from propaganda (war) posters. The use of these imageries in these works serve as an index to how our minds functioned during times of conflict and how we measure ourselves within the codes of visual history in modern and post-modern times.

Manuel Ocampo, renowned artist from Manila, Philippines and Irene-Iré from Madrid, Spain, collaborate on this new series of paintings. In Irene-Iré’s work, similar visual cues are used from different ideological camps during the Spanish Civil War, using them to clash with each other resulting in an abstraction or something completely new. In Manuel Ocampo’s paintings religion and politically charged images are often used in order to test their efficacy. But Ocampo also knows that paint daubs, however art referential, cannot be abstracted away from ongoing history.

In this exhibition the artists attempt to transform the subjective meaning of the image into something completely timeless and unclassifiable, open to multiple interpretations. Where figuration and abstraction converge inviting a journey in time where past-present-future coexist in the canvas.

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