Art as Relational Experience

Imagine yourself on a journey, seated in the bus, quietly minding your thoughts.  Conscious of the constant motion in space and time, in your periphery is a subtle awareness of the person next to you and across you, the people going in and out at stops and perhaps the exchanges between and among the riders.  Occasionally, your attention shifts even for a moment as you sense their presence, and at times driven by curiosity, you observe, and your thoughts become engaged with interest to what you now witness.  How the world around us affect our thoughts and insights have a lot to do with what is present to our perception.  What draws us to engage deeper in thought to something in particular is the resonance it offers to our own experience, beliefs and values.  As we go about life in our personal journeys, it cannot be helped to be impacted by the collective experience of the human race.  Hence, an intangible flow of relations at work in the web of life.  One of the most vital conduits in connecting the individual to the collective, and the collective to the individual is art – the human experience expressed in creative form.

With its collection of works by twenty-two artists for Art Fair Philippines 2024, Altro Mondo offers an extensive array of deeply rooted imagery of human expression akin to every individual artist’s personal sensibility.  Some works explore personal identity, cultural roots and ancestry.  Some works reflect deep social consciousness with subtle assertions on societal hierarchical structures.  Other works concern itself with human relation to ecology.  While the non-objective – biomorphic forms, abstractions and compositions with form, strokes and tones – are personal psychical expressions that reflect aesthetic sensibilities. All these works put together mirror the collective human experience to which we, as individuals can relate to in different levels.

With this collection, Altro Mondo invites the viewer to allow oneself to be drawn to the work/s that resonate/s to him most.  To take a pause and to offer one’s presence to the artwork, the maker and the message.  To let art speak to the psyche – to personally experience the essence of art beyond any intellectual interpretations.

– Ambie Abano, 2024