Provenance: Provenance: Archivo 1984

ABOUT THE WORK

Kirby Roxas’s “Aling Rebelasyon” uses the graphic quality of the negative film image to evoke a haunting revelation. In this work, the same portrait is rendered both as positive and negative image, capturing the stark contradiction that exists in the same image. It plays on the idea of rebelasyon (revelation), which is conventionally achieved by way of a revealing light. Here revelation is achieved not by an image that is illuminated, but by way of a negative image, which works via the reversal of the light and dark parts of the image. In Roxas’s work, it is the darkness that reveals. Kirby Roxas is a Filipino visual artist who was born in 1977. He has exhibited widely in galleries, such as the Pinto Museum, West Gallery, Tin-Aw Gallery, and Boston Gallery, to name a few. He describes his work as “pop realism” in Filipino contemporary art, and is known to use number and letters in his canvases.