GALLERY KOGURE is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled “Light in the Shadow of Terror” featuring Filipino artists, to be held at Kanazawa Mercury Cave from August 10, 2024. Since our inception, we have forged strong relationships with many Filipino artists and collectors. Curated by Jason Montinola, a Filipino realist painter with whom we have had a long-standing relationship, this exhibition brings together 11 of the most dynamic contemporary Filipino artists. The unique blend of light and shadow, along with the vibrant energy characteristic of Filipino art, captivates viewers. The exhibition spans the first and second floors of a three-story building, featuring a compelling array of works ranging from small to large-scale pieces. The artists themselves are expected to attend the event.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” – Joseph Campbell

“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.” – Aristotle

To exist requires one to live in a liminal state that is marked by diametrically opposite persuasions: a desire for constant progress and a nagging fear over one’s mortality. In this seemingly paradoxical state, man endlessly oscillates between polar preoccupations:  life and death, joy and suffering, hope and terror. In the exhibition titled Liwanag sa Anino ng Lagim (Light in the Shadow of Terror), Manila-based visual artist and curator Jason Montinola tackles this primordial tension and universal human condition. Featuring works by 11 Filipino artists, Montinola seeks to present diverse contemporary interpretations on the themes of terror and hope. Borrowing the words of Bob Dyan, “He not busy being born is busy dying,” this existential tension of embracing life and confronting death is poignantly acknowledged.

Centered around the psychological experience and visual articulation of terror, the exhibition’s curatorial framework is anchored in two questions: (1) What elicits the deepest sense of terror within you? and (2) How then should we live amidst terror and suffering?

For Montinola, it is of utmost importance that notions on terror be tackled within the context of diverse visual languages that reveal the zeitgeist of the times. The acknowledgment of the paradoxical nature of cultural, technological, and artistic trends in the 21st century, and the impact of the excessive consumption of visual culture within urban societies are what prompted Montinola to structure the exhibition as windows into terror as experienced first-hand by artists whose practices span disparate mediums, visual languages, and visual narratives. Not dissimilar to what Barnett Newman was quoted as saying, “The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty”, Montinola, by putting together a diverse line-up of painters, seeks to bring to the foreground the visceral and visual qualities associated with terror regardless of visuality and aesthetic sensibility.

-Patrick de Veyra

[Artists]
Arturo Sanchez Jr, Bjorn Calleja, Dexter Sy, Jason Montinola, John Marin, Kaloy Sanchez, Kim Hamilton Sulit, Lec Cruz, Manuel Ocampo, Renato Barja Jr and Renz Baluyot (11 artists)