Patricia “Patty” Eustaquio set up first her contribution to a massive group show paying tribute to her mentor Roberto Chabet at the CCP before flying out of town. I first thought of the usual strategies for dealing with such matters (including the usual extended email interview), but Patty laid it out for me: I could go through her work. Much of her past exhibitions are online, and readers may want to see what she has been up to over the last few years.
As with any good conceptual artist, Eustaquio has an eye for the interesting premise. One of the first shows I saw of hers, the 2011 exhibition Cloud Country at Silverlens, focused on how dreams of the strange give rise to reflections upon memory and image. It was a mixed-medium tour de force, bringing together canvas, glass, blass resin, wood, and text. I saw the exhibit not long before I took my own journey to a place almost beneath the clouds. Was the show memorable? I did recognize the landscape, and probably the glass on which the text was etched. “Memory is a tricky thing,” Eustaquio says in the catalog write- up, “When we recall, we see things twice.” And, she adds, it is hard to see the second time. It is this fascination with the lacuna of remembering—the “ghost forms,” as a write-up on the Silverlens site puts it—that sets her apart.
The Eustaquio work with which I am most familiar is in the Ateneo Art Gallery’s permanent collection. “Psychogenic Fugue” is a resin piano form covered in lace cloth. The cloth may have been quite immaculate when it first appeared, but last I saw it, it was starting to yellow and fray— the reliability of memory, again. It is all the more apparent when, even if she has stood out in her field (she is a past Thirteen Artists awardee and an Ateneo Art Awards winner in 2009), the world of conceptual art here has, for me, seen images, texts, and figures dissolve into a blur.
How Eustaquio stands out is what her most recent solo show, the 2013 Vargas Museum exhibit The Future That Was, attempts to depict. It puts into question how fashion and art interact in the light of aesthetic and market forces. As a write- up on her site puts it, it consequently throws into question our perceptions of taste and the aesthetics of minimalism and maximalism. But I also see echoes of how remembering makes the familiar strange. The image that stood out was of a mannequin made in metal then painted black. It was meant to remind the viewer of a terno-clad personality of some note, by the way the hair was coiffed (though, of course, such coiffing is familiar). The mannequins were all over the space, in different poses. In one case, Eustaquio draped dark floral cloth over the legs of a seated mannequin, a passing nod to those who remember.
Indeed, what I appreciate about Eustaquio’s work is that even in her explorations of various ideas, she establishes strands of continuity in her aesthetic language. Those strands rely less on shock than on subtlety, an appreciation of the role of the material in the way we imagine the world. I am reminded of the quiet presence of a familiar friend—a presence that continues to remind me of things I sometimes take for granted. This may be true of many Filipino contemporary artists, but her voice is the kind of contrast we sometimes need when the plaudits shift from the subtle to the shocking. Such voices may be what we need now when we grow tired of all the shouting.