{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":57503,"auction_id":116,"set_id":150,"lot_number":"80","artist":"Nona Garcia (b. 1978)","title":"Untitled","starting_price":600000,"signed_dated":null,"medium":"oil on canvas","size":"48\" x 48\" (122 cm x 122 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Galleria Duemila, Inc","exhibited":"Galleria Duemila, Nona Garcia: New Paintings, Mandaluyong City,\n1 - 14 July 2004","literature":null,"write_up":"Over the years, Nona Garcia has built an artistic practice that thrives on transformation—of image, of memory, and of perception. Her works often begin with a photograph, but what emerges on canvas is never a simple translation. The source image becomes a departure point, stripped of context, magnified, reimagined. In this shift from one medium to another, the familiar turns strange, the fleeting becomes fixed, and a private moment takes on the weight of collective experience.<br><br> Garcia’s versatility has been central to her evolution. While painting anchors her reputation, she moves with equal assurance into installation and conceptual work, allowing the idea to dictate the form. Across her varied projects, certain obsessions remain constant: the pull of memory, the quiet power of abandoned or in-between spaces, and the tension between exposure and concealment. This persistence gives her practice a rare cohesion—each work, regardless of medium, speaks to the others like fragments of an unfolding narrative.<br><br> Her art refuses spectacle in favor of precision and restraint. She draws from the immediacy of her surroundings, yet her treatment of detail and surface elevates the everyday into something monumental. By withholding as much as she reveals, Garcia leaves space for the viewer’s own recollections to seep in, making each encounter with her work as much about personal reflection as it is about the image itself.<br><br> In this painting, Nona Garcia isolates an object that hovers between recognition and enigma: a crumpled, organic form, seemingly fragile yet rendered with an almost geological permanence. At first glance, its contours suggest the dried petals of a withered bloom; look longer, and the associations multiply—it could be a desiccated seed pod, a fragment of coral, or a fossilized remnant pulled from deep earth. The pale, almost chalky background heightens this ambiguity, stripping away any environmental cues that might anchor the subject in a specific place or time. This act of removal aligns with Rosalind Krauss’s observation that the frame in contemporary art is not simply a border, but an active agent that isolates, suspends, and transforms the thing it contains. Here, Garcia’s frame renders the object as both specimen and monument. <br><br>  The surface itself is a field of contradictions. Layers of ochre, sienna, and bone-white are built up with painterly patience, recalling the photographic precision of her source material yet refusing the flat, mechanical finish of a print. In the translation from photograph to painting, the image acquires a tactile depth that Barthes might describe as punctum—that sharp, piercing detail that resists narrative closure and instead lodges itself in the viewer’s memory. This is not simply a record of an object, but an encounter with its material presence, an insistence on its slow, stubborn existence. <br><br>  By denying the viewer full contextual information, Garcia activates what Hal Foster has called the “archival impulse” in contemporary practice: the drive to preserve fragments without necessarily restoring their original meaning. The work resists functioning as an illustration; instead, it operates as an open system of associations. The subject becomes a site where natural decay and aesthetic preservation coexist, a liminal zone where the organic verges on the abstract. <br><br>  Ultimately, this painting invites the kind of sustained, contemplative looking that is increasingly rare in an age of accelerated images. The more one attends to its folds and shadows, the more time itself feels embedded within its surface—the compressed time of geological formation, the fleeting time of botanical decay, and the personal time of memory’s own distortions. In this way, Garcia does not just show us an object; she stages an experience in which the act of seeing becomes inseparable from the act of remembering. (Jed Daya)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":1000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":1000000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":1201600,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":61990,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/116/150/lot/80.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":62101,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/116/150/lot/80b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":62100,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/116/150/lot/80a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":79,"next":81,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}