Hoorah for the current TAKSU show where the old adage create from what you know is once again proven to be the wisest of them all. Everything is Sacred, by Norberto Roldan, strikes the viewer as straight from the heart; works by an artist who has purpose and intelligence, and whose contemplations of their personal life experience have been successfully translated into visual art. It’s solo showing at its best and Roldan is from – you guessed it – the Philippines.

Bringing together old found bottles, toys, photographs, collectable cards, calendar pages, frames, makeup compacts, Catholic imagery and more, the artist has created a series of mini collections, simultaneously chaotic and orderly, upright within boxed frames. Each one cleverly represents a culture with no name that comes across as instantly familiar. It’s a combination of flattened half-moon bottle tops, tropical monsoon weather, red Spanish lace and American superheroes; it is Asian women posing in European dress, it is Chinese pottery, dried botanicals, and wallpaper.

In Sacred Devotions, a series of medium-sized works on display, the privileged viewer gets to peek into glory boxes, beautiful and sad as the contents may be, at the textures and colours of this portion of human existence. Although part of a “…personal visual vocabulary aggregated over time…” according to the accompanying essay, the works in this particular exhibition give snapshots. There is little sense of any progression, rather each piece contains the fading, chipping, peeling, and dullness of lives that were once beautiful and now cannot be let go. In fact, the works hardly reach beyond the Sixties. Sepia and black and white photographs, pastels and Catholic-kitsch offer up the highest emotional impact.

Roland’s major talent has got to be the insight and foresight to place ordinary objects together in a meaningful way that looks beautiful and personal. So much easier said than done. There is richness to the colours and textures Roland chooses and then combines in each assemblage, and power in the humour and honesty of certain images. Viewers can stay on the surface or they can delve deep to no end. One gets the sense Roldan saw the complete picture of this mish-mashed culture within the very first object he ever ‘found’.

We have nothing that is ours except time and memory 1 and 2 (2009) are highlights, different executions of the same idea, combining framed portraits of women and potentially corresponding cigarette cases and mirror compacts in the grid of a mad-eye collector. The suggestion is one of great potential submitting to a higher power. In other works, the same message is delivered too, but through a Byzantine-style icon, an old-Hollywood image, the medicinal ‘red’ cross shape, and glow-in-the-dark crucifixes among so much more. There is hardly evidence of existence prior to the civilisation thrust upon the human mind via these objects. So, while the art is attractive to say the least and seeing it in person is more than worth the effort of visiting the gallery, the true enjoyment of this exhibition lies in the fact that without Roldan the minute voices buried underneath it all would never have been heard.

(SW)