Neil Pasilan at Leon Gallery International

Introduction 

Neil Pasilan's solo exhibition presents a focused investigation into the expressive capacities of works on paper, centered on water-resist drawing and punctuated by heavy oil pastel renderings. The show stages a sustained dialogue between material process and figuration, assembling serial studies and larger compositions that treat paper as an active site of inquiry. This essay offers a streamlined critical reading of the exhibition, emphasizing technique, formal strategies, thematic concerns, and installation choices while foregrounding the ethereal effects achieved through oil pastel interventions. 

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Materials and Techniques 

Water-Resist Drawing 

Pasilan's primary method is water-resist drawing, a technique that foregrounds the tension between preservation and saturation. Masking fluids or wax reserves protect areas of paper, producing luminous highlights that counterpoint dense washes and ink. This interplay of subtraction and application yields a chiaroscuro that is both graphic and painterly, where image and ground are negotiated through absence as much as presence. 

Paper as Collaborator 

Paper functions as more than a support; its texture, absorbency, and scale shape the work's visual logic. Fibrous, toothy sheets catch pigment unevenly, allowing granulation, pooling, and bleed to register as expressive events. Smooth grounds emphasize line and contour. Across the exhibition, traces of process—drips, erased marks, and the ghostly outlines left by removed resist—remain visible, producing a palimpsest that documents the act of making. 

Ethereal Oil Pastel Interventions 

Interspersed among the ink and wash studies are heavy oil pastel pieces that introduce a spectral register. Dense, scumbled layers of pastel are worked and partially abraded so that underlayers and the paper's whiteness re-emerge as shimmering highlights. The result is an uncanny luminosity: figures and faces hover between surface and depth, appearing to glow from within. These oil pastel works are materially weighty yet visually diaphanous, producing halos and afterimages that complicate the exhibition's material economy. 

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Formal Analysis 

Seriality and Composition 

A dominant formal strategy is serial arrangement. Small-scale portraits and figure studies are grouped in grids and clusters, creating a rhythmic field of variation. Seriality functions as a method of exploration: differences in line, tone, and gesture become legible as deliberate permutations rather than isolated solutions. Repetition intensifies motifs—eyes, mouths, skeletal forms—so that symbolic resonance accrues across multiple sheets. 

Line, Gesture, and Surface 

Pasilan's line ranges from economical contour to dense, frenetic networks of hatch and scumble. Water-resist highlights puncture saturated grounds, producing luminous accents that model form without relying on heavy rendering. In oil pastel works, gesture becomes tactile: broad strokes and layered smudges create a topography of mark-making. Selective abrasion and erasure dissolve heavy marks into vaporous edges, producing surfaces that read as both textured and ephemeral. 

Color and Tonal Strategy 

Monochrome and near-monochrome dominate, with black ink and gray washes set against the warm off-white of paper. Strategic color punctuations—muted ochres, bruised purples, and occasional reds or greens—function as semantic accents. In pastel pieces, color assumes a spectral role: layered hues beneath translucent whites produce halos and afterimages that suggest memory, fever, or wound rather than decorative flourish. 

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Thematic Concerns 

Fragmented Identity and Vulnerability 

The human figure is central but rarely stable. Faces fragment, bodies dissolve into gestural fields, and anatomical features verge on the skeletal or mask-like. This instability signals a preoccupation with vulnerability and porous identity. Portraits read as variants on exposure and resilience: the works register traces of breath, fatigue, and affect rather than fixed biography. Oil pastel renderings intensify this tension by rendering flesh as both tactile and insubstantial—material presence that simultaneously erodes into ghostly light. 

Memory, Loss, and Testimony 

Recurring ghostly figures, skeletal motifs, and textual fragments suggest collective histories and social resonance without explicit illustration. Paper operates as witness; drawing becomes testimony. The oil pastel pieces, with their spectral luminosity, function as visual elegies—media that hold memory in suspension and make absence palpable. The works operate on two registers: intimate psychological portraiture and a broader archival impulse that gestures toward shared trauma and communal reckoning. 

Ambiguity as Strategy 

Ambiguity is a deliberate conceptual stance. Pasilan resists narrative closure, favoring suggestion over assertion. The water-resist technique and pastel abrasion both produce images that reveal and conceal, inviting interpretive labor. This openness is generative: it allows formal constraints to produce affective complexity rather than didactic clarity. 

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Installation and Presentation 

Arrangement and Pacing 

The installation emphasizes serial logic through dense clusters and grid formations. Many works are pinned directly to the wall, creating immediacy and a sense of process. Oil pastel pieces are often given slightly more spatial breathing room or placed at eye level to foreground their textural and spectral qualities. This modulation in placement helps delineate shifts between linear ink studies and the more corporeal shimmer of pastel. 

Lighting and Material Visibility 

Focused lighting and a neutral gallery palette reveal subtle tonalities and the luminous reserves created by resist. Raking light accentuates scumbled pastel surfaces and the faint halos produced by abraded whites, enhancing the impression that certain images are lit from within. The lighting strategy underscores the material contrasts—paper’s whiteness, ink’s depth, pastel’s tactile sheen—making the exhibition’s technical vocabulary legible. 

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Conclusion 

Neil Pasilan’s exhibition demonstrates how works on paper can sustain rigorous formal and conceptual ambitions. Through disciplined water-resist techniques, serial exploration, and selective oil pastel interventions that introduce an ethereal, ghostly luminosity, Pasilan constructs a visual field that is both materially rigorous and affectively charged. The show’s strengths lie in the coherence between method and meaning: processual traces, tonal subtlety, and spectral color work together to produce images that are at once intimate and resonant. While the density of serial presentation occasionally compresses individual pieces, the overall practice affirms paper as a site of testimony and inquiry—an arena where restraint, repetition, and the humble eloquence of surface yield profound expressive possibilities.