Often, there are only so little descriptors of a vision or a feeling or a philosophy. However, the bombardment of words often leaves one to be speechless, and in its insufficiency we come to be more in a state of nothingness to describe the fullness. The clearness is at its most succinct, and paradoxically, at its most accurate state.
To handle visual artist Isobel Francisco’s White Noise at Galerie Stephanie appeals much to this feeling of immensity in its simplicity. When I was first endorsed this project, I had only known the artist as someone who was adept in depicting portraits in their eloquence—raw, emotional, intriguing, and often conversational. The last exhibit I have seen of hers was from Aren’t We All Running back in 2019. The extent of figures waltzed among the space. There was so much power in their movements. So when the curator, Ricky Francisco, sent our team pictures of her works-in-progress, there were no faces nor bodies nor gestures to decipher. Yet, somehow, there were a thousand words heard through thirty pieces of heavily textured white canvases—clear, concise, driven.
“I was actually overthinking,” the artist shared with me during the day we were mounting the exhibition. I told her that the team felt that her strokes and choice of palette were so confident and decisive. “This painting—” pointing at 'Demolition,' a large painting depicting canvases all piled up in disarray beside an old computer chair, seemingly a worker in solitude in the middle of a time-forgotten backyard, “—actually had another painting underneath it.” It seemed impossible to visualize how this final painting was a mask of something else. However, it does render it poetic: to demolish something only to build something better and tell its history precociously.
Much of Isobel’s works for this exhibit are akin to such 'masking.' Her titular piece, 'White Noise' (the thirty-piece polyptych), were portraitures now buried in thick swathes of acrylic, oil, and other media (some were even cement). The attributions to features were abstracted to say the least and appear dissonant by impression compared to her other pieces like 'Bonfire' and 'Bush,' yet still created congruency in its totality. Viewing 'White Noise' was indeed, as how the curator described it, like “[being] in a foreign land or to experience something new… to see the world with fresh eyes.”
Isobel created a land of primal vigor for instinctive retribution in this exhibit, an ongoing trajectory of figurations and abstractions both concise and definitive in nature. It is made of quiet faces and expressions speaking simultaneously in revised harmonies. It took five artworks, a pile of dried leaves and a rubble of art materials, and an old cloth to narrate the aphorism.
The exhibit desires no circumlocutions. No matter how one views it, there was an emptiness filled, an expression translated, and a mask unveiled—portrayed in every bit of decibel in every bit of white noise ringing. They were all, in every way, the art in its clearest vision.
Grace Micah Oreiro graduated with a degree in Literature and acquired a Certificate in Fine Arts in Far Eastern University. She mostly writes about arts and culture, while managing operations at Galerie Stephanie.
Images courtesy of Eric Mendoza from Galerie Stephanie.