ABOUT THE WORK

Wire Tuazon has long been synonymous with a particular trope and stylistic strategy: the triangulation of title, text, and image to generate fresh, unexpected, and sometimes contradictory strands of meaning from the painting. The pictorial space becomes less of a fixed slate than an active field that explodes with possibilities. His works prefer to raise questions than answers. How do we account for the linguistic layer in the interpretation of the image? In the collision of the title and the text, what is the signified? Are the words in the painting pictorial too? To Those Burn Later is at home with this conundrum. In terms of image, what we have is a tender portrait of a father holding his newborn child. It veers off from the mother and child genre, not only because the parent is male but because the baby is depicted as crying, and not calm and restful. The word “Melancholy” runs across the image. Both a noun and an adjective, who or what is the word describing? The title, To Those Burn Later, complicates the meaning further. Who is burning and for whom? And why later and not now? A highly conceptual artist, Tuazon is not one to provide easy access to his visual language. One can in fact argue that the painting itself serves merely as a trigger, and that the “real” work happens in the mind as it teases out connections and associations. That the viewer contributes to the construction of the work’s meaning is not a new idea, of course, but Tuazon ratchets it up by enacting shifting coordinates as the viewer grapples for a stable interpretation. What the viewer ultimately discovers is a path to painting he has not explored before: dynamic, multi-layered, branching out to many directions all at once.