Andres Barrioquinto returns to London with a solo show at the START Art Fair in the Saatchi Gallery from 26-29 September. His exhibition, This is My Beautiful Title, consists of eight new works commissioned by One East Asia for the event. It follows three years on from his sell-out one-man show presented at START by One East Asia, which established the celebrated Filipino artist's reputation in London.

Barrioquinto is known for his surrealistic and dystopian imagery of beauty mixed with threat, forcing a sense of unease to creep through the viewer as the initial impact of rich colour, flawless surface and young, attractive human figures gives way to the disruptive overlay of violent motifs inspired by Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), haunted winter forests, swarming butterflies and peacocks with watchful eyes. The imagery of the peacock, a leitmotif in the artist's work in recent years, is seductive; its luxuriant material form is bound together with a mixed symbolism as the protector from evil and harbinger of bad luck. Nebulous, indistinct and compelling, Barrioquinto's work is international in appeal. The START Art Fair draws collectors from around the world, bringing a new public to the buoyant creative arts scene of the Philippines.

KEY INFORMATION

Philippines artist Andres Barrioquinto will have his first solo exhibition in the UK at the START Art Fair in September 2016. The artist will show nine new works painted specifically for the fair, which takes place at the Saatchi Gallery in the Chelsea district of London.

Practice

Describing his work as “perhaps more sharply individualised than that of the realist”, Andres Barrioquinto creates images that express his inner world of emotion and feeling rather than reflecting the apparent harmony of the world around us. He typically employs the imagery of conflict found in Japanese prints to hint at the disorder lying beneath.

Barrioquinto’s works imitate living forms – a close-up of the human face, shiny lacquered butterflies and insects, landscape backgrounds – but renders them surreal through a combination of minute observation, jigsaw-like juxtaposition of fragmentary details, and an over-layering of Japanese ukiyo-e (woodblock prints). Darkness of content, often expressed through inscrutable facial expressions and woodblock images of the warrior, conflicts with rich, saturated colours. Disorder sits within superficial serenity. On a formal level, the surface materiality of his paintings forces the viewer to look closely at the medium: a virtuoso oil painter, Barrioquinto flourishes his consummate technical skill as he chops and changes between genres, giving the painting a collage-like character. This draws the viewer’s attention to the surface of the object as an entity itself.

KEY INFORMATION