Exhibited: Art space Ayala Museum, Some Things Are Not Meant to Be Beautiful, Makati, 2010

Provenance: Provenance: Avellana Art Gallery

ABOUT THE WORK

While the portraits represent people beloved to the artist - friends, relatives, fellow artists—they are not biographical but as flesh-andblood counterparts to those who, one way or another, have to face with what Andrew Solomon calls the “noonday demon.” This is the inner voice that paints the worst-case scenarios, drains our appetite for life, questions our worth, pushes us to harm ourselves and others. Unstoppable in its track, it eats us out until it manifests externally, which Paras evokes as an abstract, corrosive element that gets spewed off from the mouth, demolishes the senses, and threatens to dissolve all notions of self-regard. In dealing with his own demons, Paras calls forth the material resources of his medium to represent, analyze, question, and ultimately understand the “black cloud” that attends human experience. He wrestles with the ground of canvas, the pictorial surface of the painting to release—and exorcise—the mind’s silent, but deadly afflictions. Destruction is affirmed, yes, but it is affirmed through the agency of art. These paintings neither call out for pity nor romanticize mental illness but acknowledge that it exists, within the context of our society where it is still largely considered as taboo and stigma is still attached to a visit to a psychiatrist. While it doesn’t promise a return to wholeness, the elimination of the negative. (Carlomar Arcangel Daoana)