The Anthropometric Man

In his latest exhibition, Anthropometric Man, Carlo Tanseco temporarily steps aside from his works featuring playful can packagings inscribed with his witty aphorisms. Here, he turns instead to something elemental: the body as measure, the figure as compass, the human form as the axis around which the world is constructed and understood.

At the heart of this exhibition is a suite of shaped canvases depicting the anatomically ideal man—riveted at the shoulder, elbow, hips, knees, and ankles, which allowed for bending, twisting, and positioning. The figure embodies movement, recalling Tanseco’s training in architecture, where the man and his motions determine the very logic of the built environment. In this sense, the body is not only depicted but also enacted—its gestures mapping out the unseen geometries that underpin how space is experienced.

In monochromatic works, the figure is shown running, his shadow in pursuit, as though chasing time itself or perhaps being chased by it. These works are echoed in a series of prints, which viewers are invited to reconfigure—an open system of permutations that expands the idea of authorship and foregrounds the collaborative dialogue between artist and audience.

In contrast, his multi-colored canvases chart a mythic terrain: Icarus taking to the skies, Narcissus entranced by his reflection, a surfer carrying his board against the backdrop of a radiant disc—a nod to Tanseco’s island life in Siargao, where sea and sun shape both rhythm and reverie. These figures delve into myth and memory, dreams and desires that surge beyond the rational body.

Equally striking are the yin-and-yang compositions, where dualities entwine—the eternal dance of light and dark, ascent and descent, the finite and the infinite. Such works remind us that the human figure, for all its precision and measurability, is also a vessel of paradox.

Anchoring these explorations are Tanseco’s early works from the 1990s: in-the-round sculptures of pounded metal, fashioned into candleholders and object containers. Functional and tactile, they extend the artist’s inquiry into how form inhabits and shapes daily life.

Anthropometric Man is, ultimately, a return and a departure. It recalls Tanseco’s architectural grounding, his search for proportion and balance, even as it embraces the elasticity of the human form—its capacity to leap into myth, dissolve into shadow, or embody the quiet symmetry of opposites. In charting these movements, Tanseco affirms the body not only as subject but as instrument: a site where deep truths are revealed in flesh, motion, and measure.