Bernardo Pacquing’s Amazing Gadgets • PhilSTAR Life

Difficult beauty, as the English philosopher and political theorist Bernard Bosanquet stated in 1915 in his work Three lectures on aesthetics“it simply gives you too much, at one moment, of what you are perfectly prepared to enjoy, if only you could take it all in.” A man whose social life was devoted to social work and political action (he was also the husband of the social theorist and reformer Helen Dendy), Bosanquet was intellectually driven by the capacity—and power—of aesthetics to imagine a fundamentally different world, to strike “a great nerve in humanity.”

This transformative approach to aesthetics requires us to abandon the comforts and banalities of convention and instead turn to works that inspire difficult beauty. Bosanquet identified three attributes of difficult beauty: intricacy, tension, and breadth. He believed that the kind of beauty found in art evokes complexity, anxiety, and vastness, “a kind of dissolution of the conventional world.” Looking at a thing intensely and attentively can thus reveal layers of recognition and awareness that are not usually available in human experience.

What comes of this endurance? Bosanquet believed that art is an exercise in self-education, a series of teaching moments, and that the experience of a work of art is itself both a pleasure and a freedom.

In the work of mixed media artist Bernardo Pacquinga, there is both pleasure and freedom, albeit submerged beneath the rough texture of everyday, artisan materials. “Causal Loops,” Pacquinga’s solo exhibition at Silverlens Gallery, is a display of sprawling assemblages, rough and gritty textures reminiscent of ruins.

Causal Loops is a three-year, rigorous invention, an active investigation of Bosanquet’s concept of difficult beauty. Writer Josephine Roque describes Pacquing’s work in the same way in her exhibition notes: “…difficult beauty, composed of different media, represents the threads of Pacquing’s artistic practice.” Throughout the exhibition, Pacquing combines artisanal technique with a kind of machinist’s fascination with rubble and discarded materials. The rawness of cement, acting as his sculptural medium, acts as a foundation for structures that fold and unfold, repeat and repeat over time.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a work titled “Lottery of Birth.” A vast, expansive canvas composed of cement mix on five panels, Pacquing’s work is full of tiny details and random ephemera: cardboard, metal wires, and brushes. These details combine to create a structure reminiscent of ruins, bristling with an enigmatic history and full of symbolic meaning.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Pacquing molds and layers concrete into intriguing forms. The “White Noise” series introduces miniature squares of wood that are framed or spattered with streaks of cement. These works draw our attention to Pacquing’s interest in scale, playing with contrast and tone, trippily playing with our gradations of curiosity.

But the works that most captivated me were those collectively titled “What I’ve Learned from My Paintings.” These works show a tinkerer’s fascination with all kinds of materials, taking bits of fabric, wood, and metal to create some alien gadget. In these works, Pacquing uses a wooden canvas as a springboard for pure madness with invention: a tangled rope spills onto a line of dried cement, tiny rectangles of wood create a tunnel, a piece of fabric hangs, connecting some strange contraption.

The title of these works is most telling in its reference to Pacquing’s eclecticism: to see them as extensions of Pacquing’s painting practice, we must examine how the medium affects the formations and fractures that sustain those structures. In its commitment to concreteness and detail, and in its marvelous display of different kinds of craft, Causal Loops takes us into a world full of the intricacies and power of the best kind of difficult beauty.