Oceanic Feeling, a term originated by French dramatist, Romain Rolland and later popularized by Sigmund Freud, refers to the a boundless feeling of the eternal that is the source of all religious energy. There certainly is a semblance of this oceanic feeling as one enters the monastic sobriety of this alabaster space, echoed and amplified by the reverberating ombak by Singaporean musician Vivian Wang that washes over the gallery. Three of Maria Taniguchi’s brick painting series are on display, spaced far from each other on the distal walls of the gallery. Large in size, matte in surface and tessellated in composition, these defiant abstract canvases possess a very practical purpose: to “take time and help me (Taniguchi) regulate my own production, my thinking”, as she attends to the quotidian task of filling in the grid. In the catalogue essay, curator Susan Gibb points out that these paintings do not exist as pure abstractions, with the stacked cell-like rectangles in the painting resembling bricks on the wall. This fact is complicated by the choice to hang some of theses canvases and have others rest against the wall, such that they appear to be “neither wholly image nor object”. Maria Taniguchi, Untitled [...]
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