{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":139,"auction_id":1,"set_id":1,"lot_number":"103","artist":"Elaine Navas (b. 1964)","title":"Red Parachute (diptych)","starting_price":2000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 2014 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"96” x 109” (244 cm x 277 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE PATRICK AND YOLANDA JOHNSON COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"Finale Art File, Makati City","exhibited":"Finale Art File, After Sir, Makati City, July 5 - August 2, 2014","literature":"Bunoan, Ringo and Elaine Navas. After Sir (Exhibition Catalog). Makati City: Finale Art File, 2014. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title at Finale Art File. Full-color illustration and painting description.","write_up":"Homage to Chabet’s Piero by RINGO BUNOAN<br /><br />In Roberto Chabet’s Piero, the artist reflects on the crisis of painting at the end of the 20th century through an assembly of his trademark materials and familiar objects. Created in 1999, the work is composed of painted plywood panels, the main material and metaphor of most of his installations since the 1970s. In Piero, they serve as the ground for a pair of raw plywood shelves, attached by metal brackets in such a way that they form a crack on the surface of the ochre landscape. Draped onto the plywood is an actual parachute, a recurring object in several of Chabet’s installations that stands in for his childhood memories of WWII. On the top corner, is an enlarged detail from Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, painted by Chabet’s former student Gerardo Tan – an unidentified male figure in the background, behind the central figures of Christ and St. John, who is taking off his tunic in preparation for his turn.<br /><br />Chabet’s choice of reference is deliberate: Piero’s Baptism of Christ is the artist’s earliest surviving work exemplifying his treatise on perspective. Using mathematical principles, he devised a grid system which enabled him to depict figures in proportion so that they appear in the painting as they are seen in real life. Chabet, on the other hand, aims for realism not by painting but by way of using actual objects. In his works, the object is both a “thing” and a “thing in itself,” referring to Immanuel Kant’s proposed distinction on how we perceive objects. In Chabet’s works, his objects function as both as the real and the unknowable - coded metaphors for a constellation of diverse sources from art history to literature, myth, as well as personal memories.<br /><br />The work was created for the inaugural exhibition of Yola Johnson’s Soumak in Makati City, which featured Chabet and Tan. It was also featured in Chabet’s historic survey of plywood works entitled To Be Continued, which toured Singapore, Hong Kong and Manila as part of the Chabet: 50 Years retrospective from 2011-2012.<br /><br />In 2014, a year after Chabet’s passing, artist Elaine Roberto-Navas, also one of his former students, who like Tan, has been the hand behind some of the painted components of his installations, paid a tribute to her mentor by painting a version of Chabet’s Piero, as part of her exhibition, After Sir.<br /><br />\nElaine Navas’ latest solo exhibition titled After Sir at Finale Art File is a tribute to her mentor, Roberto Chabet. Both an appropriation and a commemoration of the late artist’s works, the exhibition recalls some of the anxious objects he has left behind—the red and white parachutes, the red neon basketball hoop, the battered wooden school desks, the deflated plastic globe, the cast-iron monay, and the multicolored ziggurats.<br /><br />For this exhibition, Navas selected images from Chabet’s archive and used them as a guide for her paintings. Like many other artists, she paints from photographs but what sets her apart is that she does not confine herself to the strictness of photorealism. Her distinctive use of impasto creates an intense physicality to her works. Instead of making faithful copies, she paints with abandon and transforms the flat images into sentient moving forms, quite in the same way as Chabet sets his everyday objects into paradoxical collisions through his ephemeral installations.<br /><br />Paint is alive in Navas’ works; it gains its own momentum as soon as she lays it on her canvas. Her pulsating brushstrokes have a frenetic energy all to their own. While uninhibited and unrestrained, her expressive and bold handling of paint also imparts a kind of familiarity and tenderness for her subjects. Her other works include portraits of artists in her community and paintings of things in her immediate environment, such as her children’s homework and toys, fruits in her kitchen, or the canopy of trees outside her window. She has also previously appropriated other artists’ images for her paintings, including Roni Horn’s River Thames and Michael Wolf’s bastard chairs.<br /><br />Navas studied Painting at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts (UPCFA) in the late 1980s under Chabet and since then, has been his close follower and friend. He curated several of her exhibitions, including her first major solo exhibition About Face at the Ayala Museum in 1997. In many ways, he was a father figure who provided his close students with constant guidance and support. His sudden death last year was an enormous loss for Navas and many of his former students at UPCFA who had to face life After Sir. (Reprinted from the catalog of the 2014 exhibition “After Sir” at the Finale Art File)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":2800000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":2800000,"userBid":7890,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":3364480,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":111,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/1/1/lot/103.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":102,"next":104,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}