Katrina Bello: Dark Between Flashes

Modeka Art
October 5 to 26, 2024

Metro Manila, Philippines

Link to exhibition

Darkness can be perceived in between intervals and flashes of light, or the mere absence of it. Katrina Bello’s solo exhibition Dark Between Flashes¹ is her continued contemplation on the natural world through her own immense and magnified visualisation of landscapes. Her landscapes and seascapes are manifestations of places that exist and used to exist as Bello traces her personal relationship with land while traversing between two totally different geographies: the Philippines and the US.

Combining graphite, charcoal and pastel on paper, her series of work demonstrates intense and almost abstracted images of land terrains and water bodies. Her approach to massing light and dark values give her landscapes a certain depth and texture. The intensity of her composition makes her depiction of land and water formations a mystical scene — their vastness is captured and frozen in time, as if, in the artist’s own words, there’s “the sense that [the viewers] can hold it in the palm of their hand.”

This mystical feature found in her landscape and waterscape produces an impressionistic image for both, making it difficult to tell which is which. Take for example, her image of Salix, a species of tree, shares the same softness and aesthetic quality found in her waterscape titled 30,000 Tons. However, it’s not the intention of the artist to make a distinction. This is apparent in the way Bello makes references to both land and water in her drawings (Terra Niobrara, and Immensity series) and metal prints (Lupain series).

Bello’s Dark Between Flashes serves as a record of the internal and external changes, as well as the transformations that transpire throughout time. In this exhibition, Bello establishes a strong relation between time, space, and the self — the composition of her own landscape. At the core of her practice is the desire to belong to a place. (JLT)

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¹The title of the exhibition Dark Between Flashes is an excerpt from George Kubler’s 1962 book “The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things.”