Frederick Sausa: Mimetic Sojours Sojourn
Frederick Sausa: Mimetic Sojourns
December 31, 2025
Frederick Sausa’s practice reconfigures Philippine contemporary painting through appropriation, material experimentation, and socially attuned installations; his work—documented across gallery shows and social media—intersects with Mike Adrao’s quieter, drawing-led investigations to produce a productive tension between Angono’s communal heritage and Marikina’s urban craft-oriented culture.
Frederick Sausa: artistic impact and documentation
Frederick Sausa’s recent exhibitions and online documentation reveal an artist working at the intersection of appropriation, industrial materials, and pandemic-era subjectivities. His Blanc Gallery shows foreground the reuse of found imagery and acrylics—materials associated with billboard and street practice—positioning his paintings as both industrial and intimately photographic in their detachment from oil-paint traditions. Local gallery programming and social-media posts (gallery features and exhibition announcements) have amplified Sausa’s visibility, presenting works that combine stitched objects, inflated surgical gloves, and appropriated magazine imagery to comment on corporeal vulnerability and public spectacle. Exhibition videos and group-show documentation further situate Sausa within collaborative networks of Manila galleries and artist-run spaces.
Sausa’s impact lies in bridging street-derived materials with gallery discourse, making visible the labor and visual economies of urban signage while reframing domestic and pandemic detritus as sculptural and pictorial subjects. His presence on gallery social channels and community posts has helped circulate ephemeral installations beyond physical locales, enabling critical dialogues about materiality and social context in Philippine art.
Mimetic Avian Conglomerations on Canvas
Mimetic reframes what was previously described as mimicry: it names a relational process in which representation is not merely copied but enacted, internalized, and transformed through repeated practice. In this register, the artist’s repeated bird motif is mimetic because each painted or stenciled bird performs an act of becoming—taking on attributes, gestures, and histories that are both borrowed and newly constituted by the artist’s hand. The canvas therefore functions as a site of ongoing translation where imitation is generative rather than derivative.
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Definition of Mimetic Practice
Mimetic practice foregrounds the process by which forms are learned, rehearsed, and reconstituted. Rather than implying passive replication, the term emphasizes active embodiment: the artist learns the bird’s posture, voice, and movement through iterative mark-making, and those learned gestures are then reissued across the surface. Each iteration is a re-enactment that both preserves and alters the source, so the work becomes a chronicle of technique, habit, and adaptation. In this sense, the mimetic is a method for producing difference through repetition.
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The Performative Dimension of the Mimetic
When the bird motif is treated mimetically, painting becomes a performative sequence. Each mark is a small action in a longer choreography: drawing a feather, repeating a silhouette, or layering a beak shape are not isolated decisions but steps in a durational performance. The artist’s body and attention are implicated; the canvas records not only visual outcomes but the temporal rhythm of making. This performative logic collapses the boundary between rehearsal and finished object: the painting is both score and record, and the viewer encounters the residue of repeated enactments.
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Conglomeration and Collective Voice
Dense groupings of birds on the canvas amplify the mimetic logic by turning individual acts of imitation into a collective chorus. A flock of mimetic birds stages social dynamics—echo, variation, and contagion—where each figure both imitates and diverges from its neighbors. Visually, accumulation produces rhythmic patterns and emergent textures; conceptually, it models how behaviors and identities propagate through repetition. The conglomeration thus becomes a field for exploring how singular gestures aggregate into communal forms, and how imitation can generate complex social topographies.
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Material Traces as Evidence of Repetition
Mimetic repetition leaves material traces that are legible on the surface: ghosted underlayers, scraped edges, overlapping stencils, and recurring brushstrokes. These traces function as palimpsests of practice—they make visible the artist’s corrections, hesitations, and refinements. Rather than erasing earlier attempts, the work preserves them, inviting viewers to read the painting as a temporal archive. The mimetic process is therefore not only conceptual but materially inscribed: the canvas is a layered document of learning and re-learning.
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Reflective Repetition and Self-Interrogation
Repetition in a mimetic mode is reflective: each reiterated bird prompts a slight recalibration of technique and meaning. The artist’s repeated gestures become a form of inquiry—testing how small changes in line, color, or spacing alter perception and affect. This reflective repetition resists facile readings of imitation as mere copying; instead it frames imitation as a method for probing limits, revealing how identity and form are negotiated through practice.
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Semiotic and Social Implications
Birds carry a rich set of cultural and symbolic associations—speech, migration, mimicry of sound, and social signaling. When rendered mimetically, avian forms can operate as allegories of social behavior: they can stand in for the dynamics of echo chambers, the spread of cultural tropes, or the ways communities learn and adapt. The mimetic flock thus becomes a vehicle for social critique, using the logic of imitation to interrogate how ideas and gestures circulate, normalize, or resist within a given milieu.
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Perceptual Rhythm and Durational Looking
Mimetic conglomerations demand durational attention. The viewer’s gaze moves across repeated motifs, noticing micro-variations and the cadence of marks. This slow looking mirrors the artist’s labor and invites contemplation of time, habit, and ritual. The perceptual experience is rhythmic: repetition creates a visual tempo that can be meditative, unsettling, or both, depending on density, contrast, and the degree of variation among figures.
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Documentation and Expanded Performance
When mimetic practice is documented—through process photographs, short videos, or live enactments—the painting’s performative origins are extended beyond the canvas. Documentation functions as an index of process, allowing audiences to witness the sequence of actions that produced the work. In this expanded frame, the mimetic act circulates as both image and event, and the boundary between studio ritual and public performance becomes porous.
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Conclusion
Redefining mimicry as mimetic shifts emphasis from passive copying to active, embodied repetition. In the context of avian conglomerations on canvas, the mimetic foregrounds learning as performance, accumulation as social choreography, and material residue as historical record. Each repeated bird is simultaneously an act of imitation and an instance of invention; together they form a field where identity, community, and technique are continually remade through the artist’s sustained practice.
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Mike Adrao and the local geographies of practice
Mike (Michael) Adrao’s practice emphasizes drawing, structural collapse, and contemplative silence, often realized through large-scale ink and charcoal works and resin sculptures that evoke architectural and domestic decay. Adrao’s career—rooted in the University of the Philippines milieu and artist-run initiatives—has been documented through institutional pages and gallery biographies that trace his trajectory from illustration to sustained studio practice. His work’s reception in museum contexts underscores a different institutional trajectory than Sausa’s gallery-and-street hybridism.
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Comparative tensions: Angono and Marikina
Angono’s identity as an art capital—anchored by historical figures, petroglyph heritage, and dense gallery networks—creates a communal, heritage-inflected context for artists and public programming. Marikina’s civic identity, shaped by craft, shoemaking, and emergent street-art initiatives, fosters a pragmatic, craft-oriented public art ecology and mural culture. Sausa’s material strategies resonate with Marikina’s street and billboard lineage, while Adrao’s contemplative drawing practice aligns with Angono’s museum and heritage frameworks. The tension between them is productive rather than antagonistic: Sausa’s urban-material immediacy challenges institutional modes, while Adrao’s measured, archival sensibility insists on sustained attention and silence—together they map divergent but complementary routes for Philippine contemporary art.
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Table: Comparative attributes
| Attribute | Frederick Sausa | Mike Adrao |
|---|---:|---:|
| Primary media | Acrylic, found imagery, mixed media | Ink, charcoal, resin sculptures |
| Institutional route | Gallery shows, artist-run spaces | Museum exhibitions, residencies |
| Local resonance | Street/billboard aesthetics; urban detritus | Drawing tradition; contemplative archives |
| Public documentation | Active gallery/social posts; exhibition videos | Gallery bios; museum reviews |
| Audience | Urban gallery-goers, online followers | Institutional audiences, curators |
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Conclusion
Both Sausa and Adrao contribute distinct vectors to Philippine art: Sausa by foregrounding material economies and social media circulation; Adrao by deepening drawing’s institutional and contemplative possibilities. Their coexistence—rooted in Angono’s heritage and Marikina’s urban craft—creates a dynamic field where material experimentation and disciplined silence each push the national conversation forward.
Amiel Roldan's curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational.
Amiel Gerald Roldan
I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts.
please comment and tag if you like my compilations visit www.amielroldan.blogspot.com or www.amielroldan.wordpress.com
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan: a multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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