by Philip Paraan

Coincidence, serendipity, happenstance are only few of the lexical appointments to describe the inscrutably random and wild occurrences in a patterned order. Rare coincidences are such a baffling, untamable beast with a force to subvert outcomes. But there is always room to make random and fortunate discoveries a more positive experience.

It’s exactly what characterized the chance acquaintance between Max Balatbat and Warren Benedict Khong who met some time ago in Singapore. It was a spark which immediately led to friendship between two artists who embody starkly contrasting cultural moods and art practices. The meeting became the genesis of this collaboration into their shared passion and creative games.

This two-man show is a willful play and syncretism between abstract and figurative art, no matter how seemingly distant and disassociated in several ways these artists are. At a glance, staging their disparate works may confound critical engagement with their odd juxtaposition; however, the concern is more in the act of contracting and exploiting novel possibilities.

Khong’s production of stylized and semantically encoded images in manga-esque fashion is his graphic response to beauty. Though manga is more popularly associated with animation and pop culture, Khong’s works are rich in implications. His discursive and esthetic agenda is to redefine how we see ideal beauty thru female human faces. As he declares, he intentionally employs this style of visualization but with a desire to move away from the pictorial fetish with the use of image + text. Its cerebral thread however lies in the fastidiously embedded scripts found in the strands of hair of her female subjects-- a trope he ably commands. These minimal texts also predicate the other evocations of his works. With his mannered visual sensibilities, the logic and play of whatever oblique meanings in his paintings remain accessible.

In his delicately rendered work, he attempts to do away with any traces of crudeness making them so impeccable as if they were machine printed rather manually produced.

On the other hand, the spirited and honest Balatbat, who works on architectural abstraction, shares the other side of this pleasant coincidence. As he conveys narratives of internal geographies, his linear and geometric sensibilities naturally command the grammar of his clever construction. His decked and overlapping patterns which recall architectural plans, maps and a flummoxed yet subtly organized patchwork of wallpaper and other formal elements have been the receiving the accolades of his peers and the international art community.

In an evolving stance, Balatbat makes some slight shifts in his works as he has selectively done with some of his recent production. This time he presents more with more frontal perspective approaches, rather than aerial/top along with the appropriation of more palpable imagery and striking coloration.

But as he reframes his visions, he remains committed to his ongoing concerns which is to estheticize personal and contemporary memories of the grim and in turn, esthetically reconstructing them anew in his canvas. In a way this show perhaps charts this artists’ dynamic and ongoing refinement in his visual skills and his works' representational values. In sum Balatbat’s work continues to be familiar, legible and resonant.

Some people and things are just related to each other in many random ways and some coincidences are indeed delightful. Balatbat and Khong again remind us why.

Exhibit opened last April 9, 2011, at the Renaissance Art Gallery, 4F Artwalk, Megamall, Mandaluyong City Philippines