Creating a beautiful and filthy world of memories

The gallery is quiet, even before the artist begins to speak. Patricia Eustaquio sets a pitcher of water and a glass on the table, then sits down and proceeds to read her notes from a laptop. It is strange to hear artists talk about their work, but Silverlens Gallery makes sure all exhibitors interact with their audience. One artist decided to do yoga instead. "They don't have to talk, they just have to do something," said Creative Director Isa Lorenzo. "It just so happens she's a good speaker," she added, referring to Eustaquio. Petite and short-haired in Tinkerbell fashion, Eustaquio tells the story behind her exhibit Dear Sweet Filthy World, taken from the Elvis Costello song.

She begins by quoting one of her professors, who taught her that 1+1 = 3. She says this is the underlying impetus for her work. She is fascinated with perception: the steps of seeing, recording, and remembering. She is also fascinated with memory, but she is less concerned with the actual memory than with how it is accessed. "More precisely, it's a reconstruct," she says. She shares excerpts from authors she likes to read: Oliver Sachs, Rainer Maria Rilke, Umberto Eco. Pretty heavy stuff, but somehow Eustaquio's work has a softness to it. Perhaps this is because her work is about finding the balance between opposites, as she herself says. She likes exploring the push and pull of "opposite poles of magnetic elements" - life and death, beauty and the grotesque, and tries to find the balance in between. She likens this to climbing a mountain, placing one foot firmly on the ground and testing whether you can move the other foot or not. Of Dear Sweet Filthy World, she says she had been feeling socially aware, borrowing memories and looking at photos. She wanted to capture what she called "melodrama based on false premises." Her works, just a few, occupy not much of the gallery's empty space. This is how she wanted it, she says. The individual pieces, too, are not named, as the artist thought it would be redundant, since they all fall under the theme Dear Sweet Filthy World, which is like a love/hate relationship. The works speak to each other, too. The boats which look like they were fished out of a swamp, the conch shell canvass with frayed edges, and the cardboard sculpture of a hearth being eaten by a rock. Eustaquio is comfortable with sharing her thoughts on her work. The exhibit comes with a letter from the artist, which begins: Dear sweet filthy world, you're punishing us, or so they say. Never the mind since I have yet to see it myself, this utter disaster that washes everything away only to flood others' memories with things they would like to forget. She quotes Sylvia Plath, "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead." And of course, Elvis Costello, "I can't go on I can't go on I can't go on. I must close now." Despite the heavy theme, the exhibit carries a certain hope -- life finds its improved reflection in art, and the world, mess that it is, is truly beautiful. – YA, GMANews.TV Silverlens gallery is at 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Warehouse 2, Yupangco Building. Gallery hours are 10 to 7 pm, Mondays to Fridays, and 1 to 6 pm on Saturdays. Call 816 0044 for inquiries.