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Galleria Duemila Inc.

Galleria Duemila was established in 1975 by Italian-born Silvana Ancellotti-Diaz. Today it is the longest running commercial gallery in the Philippines and maintains a strong international profile. With the vision to expose Filipino artists locally and within the ASEAN region, Galleria Duemila specializes in contemporary paintings, sculptures, works on paper and installations, as well as rare secondary-market stock by modern Filipino masters. It handles rare works by modern masters of the early 20th century, including Fernando Amorsolo, Fernando Zobel, H.R. Ocampo, Vicente Manansala, Jose Joya and Cesar Legaspi and showcases local and foreign artists from the current generation. This mix of established and emerging artists presents a dynamic program of monthly art exhibitions complimented by performances, readings and musical events in its custom-built gallery in Pasay City, Manila.

Apart from these endeavors, Galleria Duemila significantly devotes much of its resources in the advocacy of art historical research and scholarship with the publication of the books ?Yuta: Earthworks by Julie Lluch?, ?Diosdado Magno Lorenzo: Art Rebel to Legend? and Messenger of the Gods: A Duddley Diaz Retrospective (Tentative Title) among others. Galleria Duemila also takes pride for being the only local gallery to do in depth research in order to mount Artists? Retrospective Exhibitions namely that of ?Julie Lluch?s? at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in 2008 and that of ?Duddley Diaz?? at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum (UPVM) in 2009. Equally important projects include artist Pacita Abad?s ?Circles in my Mind? Exhibition in 2004 at the CCP and a collaborative work with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the UST Museum for the documentation and exhibition of ?L?orto dei Marni: Francesco Riccardo Monti Scultore 1888-1958? in 2005.

Working closely with the foremost private and corporate collectors of Philippine art here and abroad, the gallery also maintains close ties with museums throughout Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. It has sold artworks to museums such as the Singapore Art Museum and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in Manila and has engaged in collaborative work with the Metropolitan Museum. Corporate collectors acquiring art from the gallery include ABS-CBN, Bank of Tokyo, Bank of Philippine Islands and San Miguel Properties. Works of art have also been placed in a number of internationally recognized hotels, such as the Pacific Star Hotel in Guam, The Manila Hotel, The Hotel Intercontinental, and the Shangrila Hotels in Makati and Davao City to name a few.

Main Gallery/Offices

210 Loring Street
1300 Pasay City
Metro Manila, Philippines

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday: 10:00am - 6:00pm

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Galleria Duemila Inc.

HOMAGE TO EDWIN COSCOLLUELA

03 Mar 2023 – 31 Mar 2023

“Like life, my paintings have sharp or blurred edges.” -Edwin Coscolluela Art has a way of capturing a moment, an event, an experience that challenges how we visually perceive images beyond their forms, appearances and representations. Edwin Coscolluella’s works has managed to champion this notion throughout his entire artistic career, provoking the viewers’ eyes into optical bafflement and immersing them into his spacious but engulfing minimalistic compositions. Since the 1970s, Coscolluela has devoted himself into creating abstract works that continuously pushed the limits and borders of viewing a two-dimensional surface by opening the planar space to virtual movement; depicting cadence and motion; and morphing abstraction into Optical illusions (Op Art) and Kinetic Art. His masterful way of employing the simplest elements with his compositions allowed him to create dynamic combinations between the positive and negative spaces within his works, translating into varying visual experience when seen at a distance and when viewed closely. This technique of abstraction relays his intent to create paintings that are like newspaper pictures - of having sharp, crisp and defined edges but changes into half-tones, dots, grains and blurred images at close range. In his paper collages, we see how he employs his perceptual vision with the use of seemingly simple geometric and curvilinear forms along with the contrasting values of the positive and negative spaces. In Image 22, the viewer is given multidimensional option in interpreting the shapes within the composition, on one hand, the dominant black color can be seen as the background that highlights white rectangular shape on the lower left corner, or the perceiver may find the two triangular shapes set on opposing corners in black and white contrasting colors. The same could be seen on Image 23, the black octagonal shape simultaneously deploys the white triangles on every corner. The enigma of his works hides in the simplicity of his elements and then draws you in into the details where you see the dots close to the edges blur the defining lines. His works go beyond the physical experience of deciphering what can or cannot be seen on the surface, rather they are cerebral in nature, touching the invisible imaginative universe of visual perception, capable of inducing a suggestive image outside of the picture plane. In Images 12-16, Coscolluela compels the eye into seeing curvilinear shapes, convex and concave forms but the audience’s vantage point provides a sense of illusion to the viewer. In Image 14, for instance, a vase-like shape becomes evident by virtue of the bright red colored surroundings, but at a distance, the mind is urged to see an entire black oblong cropped out from the picture. This multi-faceted way of approaching the artist’s work allows the democratization of interpretation, preserving the vitality and power of abstraction. Citing Coscolluela himself “... When people look at my works, I want them to feel and not just understand my compositions.” As a teacher and photographer, Coscolluela has been an early proponent of digital art, embracing the additional dimension of what modern technology can bring into his art making process. His use of digital art has allowed him to manipulate simple lines and shapes to create his Op Art, images that suggest motion generating from static objects or imagery. In Untitled # 56, a right-angled red triangle grounds our eye into the image but the receding white lines marking two sides of a large black right-angled triangle creates two opposing movement, one that draws the viewer into the depths of the black image and the other elevates you on top of an illusory tall black object. The crispness and preciseness of lines and their relative distance with each other has allowed flexibility, flow and a perpetuity of synchronous motion as seen in the artist’s works such as Images 064, Images 193 and Untitled #33. Through these works, Cosculluela’s pronouncements on digital art’s dynamism reverberates and solidifies his artistic legacy, “The colors of my composition can last up to a hundred years. Six compositions can be enlarged individually or composed into larger panels.” Notes by Lec Cruz

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Beguiling Temptation

15 Feb 2022 – 15 Mar 2022

Artist Statement A thin line to only surrender yourself to the darker pleasure. Our pleasure of giving meaning and association to certain things tangible and intangible. I create a feeling of disparity between the imaginable and unimaginable through my chosen mode of creation. I release a dozen feelings of uncertainties on the images I create and compose. It creates a tension of beguiling temptation, like the snake to Eve in the garden of Eden. I paint something that is not what it is. Like a cognitive dissonance. My psyche keeps on sending mixed signals of different pictures with vibrations that creates confusions of the narrative. It creates a vague metaphor on things with exact meanings. Picasso once said "every act of creation is first an act of destruction". – Valdizno, Trek (2022) Exhibition Notes In Retrospect From the moment Trek Valdizno decided to defer the completion of a degree to dedicate his time and energy on painting, no one doubted that he would produce a litany of shows spanning thirty years. He continues to do so feverishly staying true to a regime of studio work adopted from a mentor, Roberto Chabet. It is timely for the artist to celebrate a milestone with a gallery that mounted three of his solo exhibitions in the last decade. An intro video provides a virtual tour of San Rafael, Bulacan showing the artist scouring the countryside on his bike between studio rituals. It hints on the origin of his creative impulses. His journeys through phantasmagorical imagery are apparent in a text-based document of a solo show in 2008. These “urgent discussions” between the artist, the gallerist and myself affirm Trek’s intimate connection with nature who in turn reveals it in its rawest state on canvas. His brushwork demonstrates vibratos over a range of silhouettes. They oscillate from shapes of earthly elements such as insects, birds, flowers, and minerals to the vibration of cosmic and astral bodies. With a measured demeanor for invention, the artist’s approach to painting is constant and timeless, as epitomized in a most memorable exhibition in three parts at the Cultural Center of the Philippines entitled Cloud (1993). It is from an abundance of external stimuli that the artist gathers momentum to call on a new order of the mysterious. Valdizno expedites dilutions of acrylic paint and employs intuitive methods of building form through color. The artist’s temptation to employ impasto is bequeathed to an underlayment that invites ambulatory patterns of dispersion leaving natural forms of resistance to embody transient revelations. The exhibit lingers on an introspective note where an album lies limpid on a pedestal. It appears to have been submerged in floodwater transforming the artist’s memories into languid reflections of still, murky water over rice paddies. Juxtaposed against a tableau (Love in Acapulco 2, 2020) made during an intense period of the pandemic, this album of decrepit photographs alludes to the artist’s desire to rise from the ashes. — Palomar, Sandra (2022)

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Galleria Duemila Inc.

The Hotel Painter 2

07 Apr 2022 – 30 Apr 2022

THE HOTEL PAINTER 2 In Jonathan Olazo’s latest solo exhibition, The Hotel Painter 2, at Galleria Duemila, the artist remains steadfast to abstraction as a viable medium for contemporary expression. Comprised of a suite of acrylic paintings, the current iteration follows an earlier work first presented in 2013, wherein Olazo gallantly sought “to reclaim abstraction’s dignity in a society that has relegated it to mere decoration. Taking the hotel environment as a starting point for this type of dismissal, he attempts to look at it from another angle, where the hotel instead becomes a temporary refuge for a reflection on painting.” Steeped in the history of abstraction, being the son of the late renowned painter, Romulo Olazo, Jonathan has arrived at his own distinct exploration of abstraction, which can be traced to the grand gestures of Abstract Expressionism. Through the years, he has been taking abstraction for a walk, often winding, perplexing, and unabashedly nostalgic for modernity’s utopian visions. Aware of its detours and false passages, he takes pleasure in its trappings as he lays his own intuitive chartings. When the pandemic started two years ago, he remained committed to the practice and converted a small room in his home into a makeshift studio. It became his sanctuary, a space where he strived to paint daily, adhering to an axiom he gleaned from another artist, Roberto Chabet who was his mentor at the University of the Philippines. Chabet wrote, “A brushstroke is a gesture of the mind.” For Olazo, this quote has been a longtime guide for him as a painter. He says, “I almost always start with a single mark on the canvas and proceed on it layer by layer.” Taking on a lyrical approach to abstraction, Olazo creates amalgams of gestures and markings that aim to strike a chord with the viewer. Abandoning the careful orchestration and rigid precision of older traditions of abstraction, he suffuses his canvas with tension and idiosyncrasy, privileging expression over form. In his works, form seemingly begets content and maintains the proposal and phenomenon of painting as an autonomous object, as opposed to its other function of a mimetic window into the physical world. Sometimes, he even includes real-life objects that act as curious extensions of the paintings, if not as accomplices to his ongoing critical inquiry. For this exhibition, he maintains his focus on the paintings, without their usual appendages. That is not to say however that he has isolated them from the world. References to art, literature and music of a bygone era still abound, glimpsed here as faint scribbling on some of the paintings, but most effectively through the titles of the works, which serve as textual cues into the artist’s personal reckoning with his chosen practice. Anchored and at the same time moved by abstraction’s promise, Olazo takes us back to a familiar place to rediscover its undiminished potential. Ringo Bunoan _____________________________________________________________________________ Jonathan Olazo (b. 1969, Philippines) studied at the University of the Philippines - College of Fine Arts in Diliman, where he received his BFA in Painting in 1992. Since the late 1980s, he has been actively exhibiting his works at galleries and museums in the Philippines and abroad. He is the recipient of the Grand Prize from the Philippine Association of Printmakers Open Graphic Arts Competition (1987), the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1994), and the Artist of the Year at the Art Manila Newspaper Art Awards (2003).

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Galleria Duemila Inc.

SOS (Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls)

07 May 2022 – 31 May 2022

Galleria Duemila presents a solo exhibition of abstract paintings from interdisciplinary artist Jon Cuyson. SOS is part of an ongoing body of work from the artist who works in the intersection of painting, installation and film. The exhibition features paintings and collage works that explore horizontality, materiality and abstraction. In the current context of chaos and anxiety, his works investigate and claim horizontality as a form of resistance to verticality. The artist builds layers of acrylic paint and marks on the canvas, repeating and revising in order to build densities in the surface resulting in an interplay of receding and advancing geometric abstract compositions. Consistent with his interest in the narrative of the sea, Jon Cuyson borrows the maritime code distress signal, SOS (Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls), as exhibition title, and to serve as a conceptual anchor in the paintings that reveal a restrained form of poetic urgency. “While these paintings were created amidst a period of increasing uncertainty, I consider them to be proposals for contemplation. Much like the sea, these works are symbolic containers of my internal desires and fears, and can be viewed as sites for thinking and self-reflection.” - Jon Cuyson Jon Cuyson received his MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2010 and has exhibited locally and internationally, including the group exhibition Motions of This Kind in London in 2019. SOS will open on May 07, 2022 at Galleria Duemila.

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Galleria Duemila Inc.

#exposedt

08 Oct 2021 – 08 Nov 2021

#exposedt In an age of alternative facts, fake news and malleable truths, artists gravitate toward truth, beauty, the poetry of constancy and endlessness. One of their go-to subjects is the nude figure in all its imperfect poignancy, what writer Nick Hilden characterizes as “both beautiful and grotesque, innocent and sexualized, free and controlled.” And artists salivate in investigating, exploring those mysterious rainbows in between, the country of the indefinable. In some cases, the artist obliterates the identity or the personality of the sitter to focus on the pureness of form of the nude figure—eternal in its chosen pose, the anatomy of changelessness. But during these interesting times, many changes are afoot. People are metamorphosing away from their assigned gender identities and roles, shaking away the cultural expectations assigned by society or practically those who hold power. Constructs are crumbling in our era. Old, dusty beliefs are giving way to new and shiny faiths. The hitherto unchangeable nude figure is rebelling against rigidity, embracing a liberating dynamism, transforming into, well, what it authentically is. In this regard, truth may not be malleable, but it can be fluid, becomes a more inclusive truth over time. This is the mindset behind Galleria Duemila’s “#exposedt” exhibition, which opens today and is on view until Nov. 8, 2021. With this show, Galleria Duemila not only wants to “feature the masterful artworks that depict the metamorphosis of the human body by the country’s top artists, but also to create a call to awareness of the rigid gender roles that are socially expected. How people are pressured to act, speak, dress and to conduct themselves based upon their assigned sex and, therefore, assumed gender identity.” There is a tinge of irony in the title of the exhibition. The hashtag “#exposedt” is cited on social media when nudes or other bits of embarrassing personal information are leaked online (another factoid of our engrossing era). But the nude paintings and drawings of the artists curated for the show do not so much expose as tease the viewer with graceful ambivalence and ambiguity, and, in certain cases, inadvertent androgyny. There lies the grandeur in the works of BenCab, Cesar Legaspi, Duddley Diaz, H.R. Ocampo, Helmuth Zotter Da Lavant, Jose Joya, Justin Nuyda, Lee Aguinaldo, Mauro “Malang” Santos, Onib Olmedo, Ramon Diaz, Rodolfo Samonte and Romulo Galicano which were specifically chosen to spark conversations about the issue of gender identity. These artists were simply meditating on and ruminating upon the human body in all its electric, wondrously irregular shapes and forms, but in so doing, they were unintentionally foreshadowing the discussions of the future about identity (not just in terms of gender but in a more philosophical, psychological manner), who gets to identify whom and how. BenCab’s piece, characterized by nudes and squiggles, depicts a harmonic tangle of bodies. A piece by Cesar Legaspi shows a shadowy nude; another is more abstract with figures disappearing into an angular world. Duddley Diaz’s subjects are masked, ceremonial, stripped of clothes and conventions. H.R. Ocampo’s pieces are all about lines and ambivalence. Helmuth Zotter Da Lavant goes the surreal route with an erotic amputee. Jose Joya’s males show off their muscular backs but conceal the more revealing fronts. Same with Rodolfo Samonte’s. One of Justin Nuyda’s pieces shows the subject embracing a rainbow. Lee Aguinaldo’s piece depicts a balancing woman, while Malang’s shows a woman bending to her bodily limits—can be metaphors for our unsteady, strenuous times. Onib Olmedo’s expressionist pieces are grotesque and yet heroic in their nudity. Ramon Diaz meditates on the human body and the summation of its parts. And Romulo Galicano depicts a subject who revels in the totality of her incompleteness. For Galleria Duemila, “These works focus on the human body, exposing them online not only for the purpose of exhibition but also as a demonstration of the way that beauty can take multiple forms, captured and expressed by bodies stripped of the need to know or fix one’s gender.” What great artworks do, no matter the time of their creation, is amplify what our current fears and desires are, the thoughts tempestuously thrashing in our heads. Artist, in effect, exposes more about us the viewers than the stripped figures on canvas or paper. — IGAN D’BAYAN

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Conversations with my Masters

10 Dec 2021 – 04 Feb 2022

Phyllis Zaballero is an awarded and actively working visual artist/painter who has extensively studied, lectured, curated shows, and exhibited her works in Asia, Europe and the United States. She received an Associate in Arts (first honors) degree from Marymount College, Spain in 1960, a Bachelor of Arts in Economics degree and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, (magna cum laude), from the University of the Philippines, Diliman in 1964 and 1978 respectively. In the same year she was given the Thirteen Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines, together with her first solo show. From then on, Zaballero has been on the faculty of the UP College of Fine Arts, has received study and travel grants from the governments of the United States, England, France, Germany and China as well as from private foundations in Portugal and the United States. Currently she continues to be involved in the membership and on the Boards of Trustees of cultural, museum and civic foundations while maintaining links with art organizations both in her native Philippines and abroad. CONVERSATIONS WITH MY MASTERS: DEGAS, BONNARD AND MATISSE These paintings depict subjects which have had a special meaning for me throughout my life. They are acrylic mixed media works on canvas which are additions to what I baptized as my “homage and payback” series long ago, inspired by masterpieces in Art which have transcended the centuries. They are dialogues or interactions with three art legends from the beyond but whose creative presences still inhabit my studio. More intimately, I also think of them as our private conversations. I had previously connected with my idol, Pablo Picasso, in this manner by way of his incredible Spanish suites, “Pichones” and “Toros”, resulting in an exhibit some years ago which showed the results of our dialogues with the titles of “Pablo y Yo". Feeling so energized by them, I have returned to exploring the same concept from time to time. Now I am daring to speak with yet more artists by merging my canvases with the works of three legendary Masters: Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, again using their first names in the same cheeky manner for my titles, to wit: “Edgar et Moi”, “Pierre et Moi” and “Henri et Moi”! To express my admiration of their geniuses I employ an ever evolving technique which painstakingly marries emulsion transfers of photographed portions of their works with my modern acrylic paint and materials. The canvas is then embellished by my personal fancies and gestural flourishes of related archival notations and drawings but always respecting the artists’ special language of colors and forms. These sixteen interactive paintings render tribute and express gratitude to these three French immortals whose museum masterworks suffused my impressionable youth with their light, line and color. Today, in the twilight of my years, when I converse and paint “with” them, the excitement of my first seeing their paintings so long ago is as fresh as ever. I hope I have learned well while I sat at the feet of their imaginary easels, closing my eyes to recall and recreate the scenes of their French lives which so inspired them, all the while moving with the rhythm of their brushes. But most importantly for me now is realizing that they were actually teaching the child that I was and the woman I became, how to become a true artist. -Phyllis Zaballero

exhibiting artists

neueste Werke

Edwin Coscolluela
Images 279 (Edition 1 of 10), 2014
172.8 x 101.6 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 268 (Edition 1 of 10), 2013
208.3 x 122 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 193 (Edition 1 of 10), 2006
121.9 x 177.8 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 281 (Edition 1 of 10), 2014
149.8 x 289.5 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 231a (Edition 1 of 10), 2010
190.5 x 121.9 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Untitled # 070a, 2007
61.5 x 127 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 164a (Edition 1 of 10), 2006
190.5 x 121.9 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 282 (Edition 1 of 10), 2014
83.9 x 238.8 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 061, 2014
200.7 x 122 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 288 (Edition 1 of 10), 2014
83.8 x 238.8 cm (h x w)
digital design on photo paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 16, 2002
76.2 x 95.2 cm (h x w)
paper collage on paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 15, 2002
66.7 x 99 cm (h x w)
paper collage on paper
Edwin Coscolluela
Images 1, 2002
63.5 x 94 cm (h x w)
paper collage on paper
Jon Cuyson
Untitled SOS (Blue & Gray), 2022
61 x 90 cm (h x w)
acrylic medium on canvas on plywood
Jon Cuyson
Untitled SOS (Pink & Grey), 2022
91 x 61 cm (h x w)
acrylic on canvas on plywood
Jon Cuyson
Untitled SOS Collage Series (Bone-Gray), 2022
43 x 34 cm (h x w)
acrylic on acid free paper and artist tape
Jon Cuyson
Untitled SOS Collage Series (Teal), 2022
43 x 34 cm (h x w)
acrylic on acid free paper and artist tape
Jon Cuyson
Untitled SOS Collage Series (Bronze), 2022
43 x 34 cm (h x w)
acrylic on acid free paper and artist tape
Jon Cuyson
Untitled SOS Collage Series (Dark Grey), 2022
43 x 34 cm (h x w)
acrylic on acid free paper and artist tape
Jon Cuyson
Untitled SOS Collage Series (Grey), 2022
43 x 33 cm (h x w)
acrylic on acid free paper and artist tape