Artist Ernest Concepcion opens another solo exhibition at Tin-aw Art Gallery this July 2016. He presents a series of works defined by great attention to texture and surface, a seeming departure from his earlier pieces wherein backdrops of places and landmarks were apparent beneath impasto. Concepcion’s palette is vivid, his strokes textured, spontaneous, and thick. His current works take from objects as can be discerned in the mute outlines of buds and blooms within the tangle of paint as well as the mounds and hollows that define the surface of his works. He explores the possibility of material as purveyor of process and the relentless alternation of crafting and destruction as devices of design.

These recent works extend the continuum of a practice that explores dimensionality through the methods of painting and illustration. Concepcion explores materials that are viscous, those that endow terrain to painting’s ground and which allow him freedom, even pleasure in painting. He describes his method as departing from recognition of real objects which he uses as paths for paint, resin, plaster, among others to take in what can only be described as amalgam of form and the various ways it can be taken apart and made whole. Those contained in Concepcion’s canvases are tactile, vibrant, and in keeping with the exhibit title, Can’t Sit Still: replete with a miasmic and contagious restlessness.