Jucar Raquepo
Published December 10, 2020
Over the last twenty years, Filipino contemporary artist Jucar Raquepo has worked across different artistic disciplines such as painting, installation, assemblage, and video art. His paintings the majority of his work, have been defined by pictorial experiments with imagery that references and even questions art history, popular culture and personalities, politics, Philippine history and society, and Philippine contemporary art.
Audiences have come to expect a variety of emotions and visual styles from Raquepo's canvases, from comical and satirical pastiche, to playful abstractions, to refined, even sentimental collage-based paintings featuring scenes and items of Philippine history. All of them have one thing in common: a cerebral assessment and reassessment of associations and meanings and the drive to create something new.
His most famous series of paintings feature dense outrageous compositions of cartoon-like characters and large delcarations like "Corruption" and "Respect." These paintings have been called "observations of society made via a concoction of such : kitsch-art-cartoons-graffitti-signs and symbols-cubist-shapes-motifs-graphic art, all in one Filipino-Catholic-baroque aesthetic and very much influenced by the jeepney."
Raquepo, however, returns time and again to landscapes and more conservative imagery but always with a careful consideration of conventions and meaning. Paintings of recent years, for instance, start with an interesting premise. What if a contemporary artist could travel back in time. What Raquepo produces are paintings with the skin of Philippine historical imagery but with the inner workings, innards, and organs of complex Modernist composition.
Raquepo's works have been showcased in solo and group shows in the Philippine most acclaimed galleries, such as Liongoren Gallery, Pinto Art Gallery, Finale Art File, Boston Gallery, West Gallery, Vargas Museum, NCCA Gallery, and Manila Contemporary. He has also had exhibitions in Incheon Art Platform in Incheon, Goliath in Brooklyn, Freies Museum in Berlin, 8 Salon in Hamburg, NBRHC in Ontario, and Whitewater Gallery in North Bay. He Participated in the following artist residency programs; the Changdong National Art Studio in 2010, the Incheon Art's Foundation's Gate Project in the same year, and ArtsHealth North in Ontario in 2012. Source: Bastards of Misrepresentation, Nova Gallery Manila
Visit Jucar Raquepo's exclusive art exhibition of paintings at "Cacophony of Forms, Freaks, and Oddities"
