Caasi’s ‘Wound Works’ through Concealment and Exposure
It is like a vast social wound which Ruel Caasi attempted with great effort to heal in his recent exhibition of abstract works. "Wound Works" views all bodies with experiences of tragedy with distant degree of temporary or permanent conditions leaving physical and mental scars yet constantly surviving to exist while ignoring the day to day sufferings. Caasi’s series of abstraction explores the seemingly congenital traumatic relation that exists between day to day reality and the historical dimension of the individual, assessing what causes them, reflecting subjective emotions and objective reality.
"Wound works" at Big & Small Art Gallery in Megamall was take off from Caasi’s early ‘wound’ series that visually represents ‘cuts’ on canvas as injuries, where he explored the different conditions when the body is exposed to external reality, subjected to harsh social conditions resulting to emotional and physical tragedy. Wounds are not only caused by severe aggression and physical brutality but due to greater feeling of despair. Probing further the panoptical consciousness of individual, in his latest works, some reductive in both color and shape, almost completely in shadow, beneath the posing quiet images are traces of aggression or intrusiveness on body and in mind - the fragility and weakness of human conditions.
Using light industrial materials such as epoxy, metal sheets, and metal primer, each of these ‘wound’ series executed with delicate impasto, fluid sweeping strokes and deftly scratchy marks of revealing scars, textural cuts, smooth linear tensions and flecks of colors indicating remains of human tragedies. Given the absence of vitality, the emptiness of spaces connote desperation, quiet moments of healing wounds, withdrawal or grief, exposure and concealment of experiences, vulnerability of human and self-protection against pain; and discomfort and desperation. Peering from the ‘cuts’ or openings of our injuries we learn to survive. Wounds after all, are vehicle in the process of learning, healing and teaching. A broader reading reminds us that wounds are apparently our irreconcilable desires in the never-ending human tragedy.
6 ft. x 2.5 ft.
8 ft. x 5 ft.
2 ft. x 2 ft.
2 ft. x 2 ft.
2 ft. x 2 ft.
2 ft. x 2 ft.
2.17 ft. x 2 ft
(66 cm. x 61 cm.)
Ruel Caasi’s "Wound Works" was on view beginning May 27 until June 9, 2005 at Big & Small Gallery at SM Megamall in Mandaluyong City.