ABOUT THE WORK

Tan’s usage of material ranges from traditional ones like acrylic, oil to photographs, mirrors, dust and bundy clocks. The painting exemplifies Gerardo Tan’s collage-based paintings that are offshoots of his collages in the early ‘90s. In his collages and paintings, Tan mines and combines images from the art world with common ones, fusing abstraction with figuration and infusing new itinerant meanings to images as they are reconfigured anew. In Cerulean Bar, he juxtaposes fragments from Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic pop art and veers away from the usual conventions of the already conceptual and abstract form of collage by doing away with the usual expressionist and pictorial cohesion of the discipline. Instead, Gerardo Tan utilizes various canonical modernist and postmodernist works in order to show and question the differing perspectives of different media. But, he does away with the historical and narrative connotations of each piece and lays them out equally and democratically. Such treatment does not seemingly interest Tan. Instead, he focuses on the aesthetic potential of each style as a way to express the subjective nature of perspective and even the very act of seeing itself.