Primal Salvo in Vibracolor
Silverlens, Manila
May 24 - June 23, 2012
Fast and cheap and out of control: there’s a catch-all that nails the quintessential ethos of pulp. You could nail the quintessence of Dina Gadia’s new work with it, too. The thing it slightly misses, on both occasions, is the vibrancy.
Pulp is the base matter of Primal Salvo In Vibracolor, Dina Gadia’s new show of collages and paintings and installations, and its fundamental process is the mashup, that willfully mismatched juxtaposition of art and copy, specifically the taking of dated, banal images from old encyclopedias and lifestyle magazines, which are in and of themselves, signifiers of both obsolescence and also of nostalgia, and using garish and bombastic pulp titles, some taken verbatim and some mashed up, as commentary, as counterpoint, as annotation, as re-contextualization, as punch line.
The tawdriness is as much an aesthetic directive as it is a function of osmosis, as Gadia seems fueled by her desire to revel in the relative rawness and ugliness of her chosen subjects, aiming as she is for that boiling point in pulp where “bad” bubbles over into “good”. In many ways, she’s trying to replicate her own pleasures with it and in many ways, she has. Primal Salvo In Vibracolor is, like prime pulp, fast and cheap and out of control: its resonances may be deep-seated but its delights are immediate and for what it’s worth, it’s funny as all hell. - words by Dodo Dayao
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| Hard Ride, No Vision and Raw Flesh, 48" x 48", acrylic on canvas, 2012 |
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| Abominable Position, collage, 2012 |
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| Let the Love Flow, collage, 2012 |
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| We All End with Lines of Aging Cliche I, plywood, housepaint and steel, 2012 |
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| Everything in Modernation II, collage, 2012 |
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| It's easier to paint the tree than to match its color, 48" x 48", acrylic on canvas, 2012 |
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| Life on the Fast Lane, collage, 2012 |
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| Display of Hard-earned Callousness, collage, 2012 |
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| Fangs Into You, collage, 2012 |
