Call of a Higher Order
Jonathan Dangue x Jef Albea
Booth D5
Art Lounge Manila proudly presents the very first collaboration of two multi-talented cross-over artists, Jef Albea and Jonathan Dangue. Stage actor turned designer Jef Albea is known for his flowy, intricate gowns that have graced runways in Dubai, Canada, London and other centers of fashion. While Jonathan Dangue is a licensed architect who won two consecutive grand prizes for the Metrobank Award for Design Excellence (MADE) Competition for sculpture and architecture. Both are presenting sculptures inspired by a higher order for ManilArt 2021.
More senior of the two in the visual art scene is multi-awarded sculptor Jonathan Dangue who presents forty wall-bound scrolls of brass on colored stretched canvas bases. A symbol of knowledge, learning, and authority, scrolls have been used through the ages in various cultures to contain the wisdom of the age, and special decrees from royal authority.
Fresh from his successful second solo exhibition at Art Lounge Manila, Jef Albea presents works inspired by air, stars, and the tarot, and other mystical inspirations which go well with his sculptures of graceful, slender, sylph-like women.
From a quick glance, it might be easy to miss the connection between the body of works presented by the two as both in form and material, they are vastly different. Dangue’s rolled sheet brass presents material and conceptual uncompromising solidity, while Albea’s clay sculptures are a visions of fragile fluidity. But both conceptually present a higher order, either in human ascendancy, such as in Dangue’s scrolls, or in Albea’s panoply of works which insinuate a cosmos which is governed by immutable laws and unquestionable righteousness. The cylindrical construction common to both their bodies of work imply coordinated and graceful movement that follow the unfurling of nature in its time, unhurried and attuned to the its own inherent cycles, not necessarily in pace with our linear time, but with the movement of seasons and stars.
In a world turned topsy turvy by a pandemic, the works of Albea and Dangue reassure us that even the chaos will give way to purpose, and that there is a higher order to our existence. All we have to do is to listen and heed the call.
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