In art, a line is often described as a moving dot. Before it becomes a marker of movement extending to infinity, it is first a point that is exact and true in its location within space. The works of Paulu Bruselas and Hana Villafuerte allude to this threshold of motion—moments of transience (Bruselas) and childhood (Villafuerte) that suspend life in points, though briefly, before it ruptures once again into relentless passing. Bruselas’s works are an ode to the color blue. In his words, blue conveys “a kind of wistfulness and longing that capture the essence of brief encounters.” His use of story panels becomes operative of his attempts to depict the entirety of an encounter, but it is a move limited insofar as the panels can convey. All gestures and occurrences beyond are lost, their passage and loss thereafter mourned. The same undercurrent of longing permeates Villafuerte’s illustrations. The artist explains that the works, centered on childhood memories, grasp at what has been lost as life “charges forward at the speed of light.” Villafuerte’s subjects take place in summer breaks and family homes, where tenderness is a resistance to the unbending march of time. Altogether, the works of both artists are attempts to make encounters, movements, and pasts contained, as if attempts to distill them into the finiteness of memory. Before they are lines charging through the motions of the past, present, and future, they are first points that took place in specific junctures of time and space—their truth affirmed if not within story panels, then within one’s memories.
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