Patricia Perez Eustaquio: Flowers for X

Yavuz Gallery presents leading Filipino artist Patricia Perez Eustaquio in “Flowers for X”, her highly anticipated first solo exhibition with Yavuz Gallery. Eustaquio employs the language of conquest and the hunt in her signature study of objects at their end of their lives, in a poetic meditation on consumerism and the mutability of taste and desire. The exhibition follows Eustaquio’s recent solo presentation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France, and opens in conjunction with her participation in the Singapore Biennale 2016. Eustaquio’s practice brings contemporary sensibilities and concerns to traditional painting and craft, drawing in particular from the still-life tradition of the Dutch Renaissance. She employs baroque, decorative forms – now considered thoroughly out of fashion in contemporary aesthetics – to question our ever-changing tastes and resulting patterns of consumption. According to the artist, “How we consume is detrimental to our reality, albeit a reality we’d like to ignore. Instead, we focus on our own appetites for things, instead of how and where those things come from.” An ongoing motif in Eustaquio’s work is the wilted flower, depicted in monochrome on stark backgrounds as if drained of life; abstracted and fragmented to appear almost like a crumpled piece of paper, tossed aside after use. She depicts a flower at the precise moment a flower loses our attention and is passed over for another. In Flowers for X, dying blooms are painted on round canvases, highlighting their ornamental quality – beautiful objects to be possessed, like medallions or cameos, or consumed like game served on a platter. These are the “martyrs” of our consumption, the lives demanded by and laid to waste in our conquest over nature and natural resources. Elsewhere in the exhibition, plastic flowers are transformed into tall, ornate spears, alluding to both the hunted and the hunter. There are no human figures in Flowers for X, but our presence is looming, and our touch destructive.