The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Lives and works in Manila, The Philippines Francesca Enriquez was born in Manila in 1962. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) in 1987 at the University of The Philippines, where she is teaching at the College of Fine Arts and pursuing a Master of Arts in Art History at the Department of Art Studies. She has exhibited extensively in The Philippines and abroad, either with college 'batchmates' (classmates) or with members of a women artists organisation called KASIBULAN. In 1995, Francesca Enriquez represented The Philippines at ARX (Artists' Regional Exchange) in Perth and obtained her MA in Fine Arts at the Norwich School of Art and Design, England. The search for ground has rooted the art of Enriquez in the memory of the home. The home, which recollects the space of her history as an artist and a woman, takes on the form of houses and their various displacements and dislocations: sofas, latches, lampshades, dining room tables. The ground that houses these fixtures is the surface of the painting, stretching like a plain of sheltering skin, but broken up by the ruins of myriad and miniature homes. In light of this rethinking of home, Enriquez's fascination with the texture, colour and spontaneous brushstrokes of fauvism and abstract expressionism has led her to traverse the trails of a more significant itinerary-her map to freedom. The installation The house: Everything is every thing 1996 fleshes out this quest. An interior scene is Yellow carpet 1995 Installation comprising oil paint on plaster casts painted on a rubble of plaster-cast kitchen sinks, cabinets, drawers, bathtubs, doors and three different types of the Infant Jesus. The artist bought the rubber templates from which these trinkets were moulded at an arts and craft store in England. The way in which Enriquez creates a 'represence' of the home on shards of both its fragments and proliferation is as much an act of staking out new ground for painting as it is of consolidating new space for herself within and beyond-but inevitably through-the home. According to the artist, the image of the home evokes the feeling of solitude, of a structure inhabited not by people but by lonely spirits who roam the mansions of memory. The flashing details of solitary doors, passageways, chairs, windows, gates and rooms speak of a pain that is unconquerable in its stoic state of silence, but clearly molesting in its screaming ubiquity. Their daily presence wears us down to routine, familiarity and tedium. However, in a twist of paradox, Enriquez believes that it is only in the home that she can paint. It is here she nurtures both the ties and tensions of family relations and art, the anxiety to create and the power to harbour space. In The world of interiors 1995, Enriquez pursues this idea further.The manner in which she seizes glossy and consumer-oriented pictures of houses under the spell of her art attests to the artist's unrelenting attempt to make different the theme of home-ness and its representations by society and the media. The interiors of these houses cease to be capitalist fetishes coveted by the mass market, 86 I ART I s T s: s O u TH AND s O u TH- EA s T A s I A but are transformed into pages of pigment, almost dripping with thick paint and thoroughly tampered with-because lived out-by personal sensibility. In all this, the erstwhile delectable interiors are suddenly suffused with agitation, with an energy that is brooding over loss and leaving. Francesca Enriquez's previous experiments with lard and found-objects cohere with her present production. The artist usually appropriates signs of excess, such as lard, which in one installation swallowed a mannequin, to convey how women are smothered by a seemingly sumptuous substance and at the same time to explore its formalistic aspects. The moulding of lard into a form is a tricky process and its deceptively neat effect allows the artist to grapple with the discrepancy between the physicality of a medium and its psychic resonances, as well as the strife between gender and commodification, the art world and the very basis of thinking about art through 'concepts'. In the two works created for the 1996 Triennial, Enriquez proves that the binarism wedded into form and content is stifling and, in fact, dubious. This she subtends into the argument that the house is both inside and outside, boundary and extension, with the artist locating herself at the threshold of coming and going: of change.The aspiration for such a connection is echoed by Enriquez's discovery of the other dimensions of painting in sculpture and objets trouves, which she construes as potential canvas, and so made to metamorphose into something which is almost, but not quite (and much more besides), their preordained functions. The artist calls this probing a rediscovery of painting, which re-emerges as metaphor, allegory, hybridity and the combination in a field of multiform possibilities. In this scheme, the brushstroke likewise partakes of a different rationality as it becomes a diacritical mark, which, while persisting with its plastic role, is always interrupted by its ever– shifting ground as the artist is continually displaced by social forces and personal perturbations. The ability of Francesca Enriquez to think of forms as constituting feeling and emotion brings her to an urgent confrontation with space, mind and body. The artifice of art in this encounter interacts with the machine of habit: the furniture of domesticity enables the dismantling of its parts, subverting the mechanical reproduction of meaning and rendering the text of art vulnerable to the contagion of power infections. From this detritus, the artist (and the woman) reconstructs a new form through art. The site of excavation becomes the site of looking and finding, and the process of transforming a sense of place in a season of exile, diaspora and re-covery. Francesca Enriquez breaks ground and paints on. Patrick D.Flores, Assistant Professor, Department of Art Studies,University of The Philippines