Ernest Concepcion

Grip of Salvation I, II, III

A Study Beyond Conceptualism for Ernest Concepcion's Art

About

When Filipino-American Ernest Concepcion started his works on these transmedia paintings, he started with large square formatted works as studies. He wasn't able to continue the series for an international exhibit a few years back but he was nonchalant about it and expressed more a gratitude to our academic training, flexibility, discipline with ideas and concepts from a common art professor at the University.  The thrust of creating your ideas through several repetitions, deconstructions, medial studies, and several workload of hundreds of preliminaries might have brought us  shared insights with the artists we really respect. 

Gaining understanding & choosing to work the formatted canvas as his large palette offered more challenges to us albeit in a simple way. 

For a time, Ernest Concepcion moved to Brooklyn, New York as a young emerging artist. I met him there again in 2003 while on my own art grant. 

He was living the life of a bohemian New Yorker artist and very much sought out. He played in a band, exhibited his artworks along with contemporary artists in the City that Never Sleeps. 

He has immersed himself with a young dynamic crowd in a different generation and even witnessing the 911 and living after its uncertainties. 

I met him again last Saturday, here on his solo show at Espace in Altromondo  titled "Soft Wars," now as his curator for Manila Bang Show 2024 art fair. 

Ernest Concepcion is one of two of my dynamic artists under "Featured Artist".

He set his body of works early on under the tutelage and umbrella of then youngest director of CCP & one of the leading contemporary conceptual artist in the Philippines. The immortal Chabet was both our inspiration throughout our university years and this lasting influence shaped us to what our principles, discipline, concepts, and direction early on to this day. 

While Ernest Concepcion was a young conceptual artist with his numerous exhibitions with this elite group of groundbreaking artists in the 1990s. I can only marvel and wait. That they equally broke even the half of the Philippine Contemporary Art influence and mileage is a great feat. The thrust in the arts spanned from the late 1970s to the early millennium with Chabet leading the full capacity stronger even in his years. 

Concepcion is a dreadful artist that broke through with his impassioned multimedia paintings shows on the Contemporary Philippine art stage. Getting accolades even before his 13th Artist Award from the Cultural Council of the Philippines. He is defined as a distinguished great young Filipino artist of the 1990s. Concepcion, amongst a few, challenged the norm and created a distinguished dynamic body of works as a painter and partly as an intallationist.

Consistent large wall-bound works sealed the name Ernest Concepcion. He is also an auction artist playing a steady "demand" from collectors abroad in New York and the Philippines.

Immortalized now is his set of three large multimedia paintings titled "Grip of Salvation I, II, & III."

Ernest Concepcion is one who was “not of an age but for all time,” he imagined the shapes, forms, and local habitations his body of works would take on through the years and be damned about them. He is gearing to see them till the end. Throwing caution to the wind. A cancanopy of splashes, stroke, lightings and textures. They are the playful colors of Ernest Concepcion. He will continue to investigate some of those shapes, forms, applications, ideology, materials and venues for his works amongst the trending aethetics of millenial artists to the end.

He will continue and will provide an overview of some of the modes of existence as both aesthetic artifact, elements in play and still as a young albeit already a cultural icon. It is a progression toward a direction led and opened by many ahead but will be culminated by those that are left behind. 

Finding one's direction early on as a contemporary artist and grounded by his mentor Chabet, Ernest Concepcion's inspirations offer us the minute details, elements in play and the grasp of a genius that abound on his canvasses. 

While this three paintings were originally conceived for a large canvas painting, it  perhaps will break ground as a foundation in itself for the  Manila Bang Show 2024 art fair.  Perhaps, creating a rich immersion for most of the artists' playful sojourn and challenge to the existing millenium pop consumerism.

Joining the Manila Bang Show 2024 art fair might not be his only laurel but as a standing exhibiting New York artist living both but certainly his latest as a Filipino American artist contemporary based in Commonwealth, Quezon City, Philippines might be the icing of living it.

Looking at how Ernest Concepcion, has his consistently novel imagery, he is situated in a battle of the now 2020s generation of newer artists who appropriate indiscriminately the imagery gleaned mostly from the latest trends, ai, and social media. A lack he rues and maybe to an extent will rule.

Concepcion's progress traces the reimagined and reinvented various media that are evident throughout his body of works. A discourse that will emphasize how the transmedial aesthetics art is never purely aesthetic or merely formalistic but also subject to complex mediations, culting, and art pendagogies.

Written by Amiel Gerald Roldan, a curator, critic and art writer for Manila Bang Show 2024 art fair.