Mirror Painting

Mirror Painting interrogates the act of painting through the camera as paint brush. Using a video camera, horizontal dashes are painted on the mirrors, the process reflected on the surface and recorded. In a mechanized form of painting, the artist Gerardo Tan goes through the colors in accordance with the arrangement of the oil paint box. Done methodically, the straightforwardness is reiterated in the simple dashes of roughly equal measure. Scattered on the floor, three televisions play the recording set at different speeds, allowing one to re-witness the development of the scene at hand in diverse momentums. The documentation implies value in the act of application, in what intimates is the essence of painting, rather than the form it takes itself. In a work of self-reflexive nature, Tan ruminates on the position of a popular and long standing artistic medium, even as he uses a different one himself.

The work was first exhibited in the artist’s solo show at the Megamall space for Finale Art File in 2002. An added feature of that exhibition was that the Artist had turned the window glass of the gallery into a one-way mirror, where the space was visible from the outside but turned into a mirror inside. The installed painted mirrors were then themselves reflected by the glass across it. The element site-specific for the gallery’s space in the mall, it was agreed not to include this in the recreation for the museum’s acquisition.

Gerardo Tan majored in painting during his BFA and MFA at the University of the Philippines and at the State University of New York, respectively. His works are often conceptual, looking at process and the possibility of reversals.

- Clarissa Chikiamco, Modes of Impact catalog, 2012