Claire Torres-Jaun has launched her second solo exhibit of abstract paintings at The Manor in Camp John Hay in continuous support for local arts and beneficiaries of a charitable organization.
The exhibit “A Woman’s Creative Awakening II” runs from June 6 to 30 featuring 28 pieces of Torres-Jaun’s latest artworks.
The funds to be raised from the exhibit will be used for the projects of the Pasakalye Group of Artists in Baguio City, which helped in staging the exhibit, and an organization in Narvacan, Ilocos Sur that supports abandoned children and the less privileged.
Torres-Jaun, whose artistic inclines had grown through the years, gets past the boundaries by exceptionally varied experiments painstakingly done – ripping a painting, punching and destroying it – an intense personal strife of deciphering the essence of working on layers.
For her, the modernist movement extracts not the objective reality, but rather the subjective emotions and responses aroused from objects and events, shuffling through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and even fantasy.
In the process of exploration, Torres-Jaun tried using tools traditionally held out of the box, unbound by age-old reliance on brushes. Her outputs display self-discoveries, finding fulfilment from using palette knife, recycled plastic, even paper on wood, shoving out new installations and letting out her passion.
Gracing the exhibit on June 6 among other guests, Atty. Richard Cariño, a former city councilor and himself an artist, acknowledged the city government’s support to Baguio’s creative industry, which has further flourished since the city’s designation by the Unesco Creative Cities Network as the first creative city in the country for crafts and folk arts in 2017.
He said Baguio is blessed with artists and it is just proper to consider it as the base of artistry not just for performing arts but also for visual arts. – Hanna C. Lacsamana
