Piezas

In PIEZAS, Ian Quirante dispenses with the pretension of unity. These works do not seek completion, as they revel in the unresolved, a resistance to reduction. Untitled and unnumbered, the works insist on the autonomy of the mark, the surface, and the gesture, elements long dismissed when tethered too closely to narrative or theme.

For the artist, automatism and spontaneous image making is not a novelty nor merely a nod to the surrealist impulse. Drawing IS his pulse. Each stroke, each inscrutable glyph, each fragment of text or number carries within it a fidelity to instinct. Resisting polish and refusing the illusionism of imposed meaning, the surface remains a site of struggle: a battlefield, as Greenberg once posited, where the flatness of the canvas confronts and contains all illusion. But these are not just gestures made for their own sake; they carry with them the residues of history, memory, and the negotiation of identity, and they have crossed the threshold to three- dimensionality.

Born in Cagayan de Oro into a family of musicians, Quirante was shaped by a landscape of experience and improvisations, his practice emerging from both self-discovery and dislocation. His lines are informed by the memory of trauma (an ekphrastic exercise triggering a childhood witnessing of dark blood on green gate), by an obsession with research beyond art school, and even the embedded memory of the father of Philippine painting, to whom he is ancestrally tied. These are not biographical footnotes, as they are part of the matrix through which his material vocabulary is shaped. Cryptic, chaotic, and humming with snippets of internal rhythm and harmony.

His pieces, paintings and assemblages alike, activate a kind of visual language that resists translation. Text appears in gibberish, rendering phonics useless; numbers suggest calculation but deny logic. In this sense, Quirante’s works share affinities with the broader cultural logic of the vernacular: open, layered, improvisational, and deeply intuitive. His compositions—scratched, stapled, collaged, pierced—do not hide their construction. Instead, they foreground process as form.

From simple drawings and paintings, Quirante’s PIEZAS inhabit the logic of fragments, shaped by interruptions and disturbances. His surfaces speak of a world assembled from detritus and desire, from scraps of memory, language, and discarded form. Found sawed-off wood cutouts find new life as components of his pieces, pierced, screwed, marked, and lashed with wire. Canvas is cut, fringed, primed, folded, crumpled, and gnashed with impasto and pieces of paper already populated with drawings and doodlings, tiny artworks by themselves. The act of tearing, layering, and assembling becomes a method of configuration that is shaped by uncertainty, but grounded in intention.

The diorama-sculptures, one kinetic and the other grounded, extend the pictorial into the realm of spatial composition. A fascination with levitation evokes both science fiction and the transcendence of cultural gravity. These assemblages are propositions of possibilities to be further explored. From selections of color in his wall-bound works, these present the opportunity for full color renderings of calculated intensity. Perhaps it comes naturally to Quirante’s artistic journey, this position of perpetual becoming, of risking incoherence for the sake of authenticity. In an art world increasingly smoothed out by dopamine-led desires and curated clarity, PIEZAS stands apart. It affirms that fragments need not be made whole to be meaningful; as they are, they are enough.