STATEMENT
My work today harks back to my childhood past time of inventing characters, creatures, worlds and narratives. I am inspired by 19th century Romantic Landscape painting where nature’s volatility merged with a seemingly innocent human presence. Chinese landscape painting has also been very influential in my process and manner of making artwork with each deliberate mark emphasizing the relevance of the negative space.
The photograph, both as an object and source, is an integral component to my work and this hybrid mix-media process of appropriation, collage, pouring paint, abstracting form and manipulating nature is symbolic, if not reflective of a cross - cultural and inertial identity-scape.
Isabel Manalo 2009
contact: isabelmaria.manalo@gmail.com
THE FOLLOWING IS AN ESSAY
BY INDEPENDENT CRITIC, WRITER AND CURATOR DEBORAH MCLEOD
In the fixed distance--blanched a sporadic white in the jewel thicket of Isabel Manalo's dappled and blistered trees--is the natural landscape of the hypothesis of No Place. Manalo provides hints of presences; children who silently populate its partly extant glens and forests to slip shyly through the watery-colored overgrowth, as pale pink, barely perceptible silhouettes. Like a more benign version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," these children's innate perfection and innocence, nurtured in such a tempting garden of uncertainties and absences, might be subject to the diminishing atmosphere and decomposing glare that Manalo's vegetation endures, yet respond by becoming essentially eternal. DM, Baltimore City Paper
Isabel Manalo’s paintings possess an uncommon transcendence and mysticism. Yet they are essentially simple and familiar in their subject matter, often with her two young daughters engaged in exploration and wonder amid the natural world. Even when the scenes are left unpopulated, it is the phenomena of the natural world that has always guided this artist’s landscape imagery. Landscape is however just the beginning of what these dynamic transmissions of time in space envision.
Manalo’s manner of giving us the physical world we expect to find outside our door is to dematerialize it to a barely recognizable degree. She quietly explodes the information, removing much of its supporting structure, allowing a few brilliant and vital fragments in the expected places to keep her viewers grounded and happy. Her paintings may most consciously remind us on a naturalistic level of very early spring or late autumn, when only the boldest foliage and blossoms enter or exit, while the rest, unavailable, exist purely in nature’s mind.
Subconsciously, the crucial white space that consumes the rest of Manalo’s picture plane offers itself as a kind of immortal reassurance. White space is generally understood to represent infinitude, the unknowable or the uninitiated, states that nonetheless most nearly describe what we can genuinely perceive of our earthly relationship to The Sublime. It is this crucial infinite white space that is really the land our deepest questions, uncertainties, hopes and prayers, our very breath, lives in.
The skipping, jewel-like glances of vivid translucent color so musically applied to the picture plane meanwhile provide a sense of hopeful providence and even joy, but it remains to that living mutable white ground that is so utterly freeing inside Manalo’s unarticulated imagery to provide us with an ultimate prospective.
Whatever presents itself to us in the concrete always requires some form of reaction, responsibility or maintenance, even if simply as a painting – a thing that holds someone else’s thesis. Once it is beheld it asks for something. The art work we actually choose to live with all contains terms we wish to reciprocate. So its dissipation into a place we cannot access requires that it fall into the purview of some further caretaker. The gift of release from that is perhaps the particular divine provenance of Isabel Manalo’s painted worlds.
Deborah McLeod
2008
Independent Curator and Critic