NORLIE MEIMBAN - MOTION

18-30 April 2009
The Big and Small Art Company Level 4 SM Megamall

Written by

ENRICO J. L. MANLAPAZ

President and Curator of Artis Corpus Gallery
13 April 2009

In early twentieth century art, Marcel Duchamp mimicked motion in a similar way that multiple exposures assisted by strobes did in photography. His Nude Descending the Staircase had always been a favorite, preceding my personal interest him as a quasi-surrealist and a precursor of modernism.

Norlie Meimban's works take off from this very idea. Imagine a man walking on the street at night. Station a camera whose shutter is open wide. Turn on a strobe light directed at the walking man. There you have it. A very simple trick indeed, but quite an effective one.

This very same idea is behind Einstein's theory of time and space: everything in the entire history of the universe is happening at this very same moment. This is very easy to imagine too, as though all the images of every single event in the world are recorded on film. Now, run these films all at the same time, wherever they happen. There you have it.

I had a chance to view Norlie Meimban's works in WhiteBox Studio late last year. What drew my attention to his work was his love of movement, or at least his obsession for repeating images which define motion. I took notice of one of his more notable works in that show, Luksong Baka, where he utilized graphic lines painted on acrylic sheet superimposed on his painted canvas. Interesting, I said.

Meimban repeats this same combination of graphics and traditional painting in his other works, qt times removing the acrylic sheet and printing the graphics directly onto his acrylic on canvas. The result retains its effectiveness. For these reasons, and for the reason that he painted children in motion, I invited him to join our Bata Ng Sining Show in March and April this year.

For this particular show at the Big and Small Art Company, movement is frozen in time, in two ways. Motion is presented statically on the grayscale photograph like paintings. Motion is also presented dynamically on the repeated line drawings superimposed on these paintings.

PED XING freezes four regular people in the action of leisurely crossing the street (quite politely on a pedestrian lane) while a man wearing his cap hurriedly overtakes them: a classic formula for contrast, very much like when some superhero moves in lightning speed around a crowd of human beings.

Sabit freezes four students hanging behind a jeep. Knowing the character of jeepneys zigzagging in the busy streets of Manila, swaying movement (dangerous and unsafe as it can be) is definitely inevitable. Yet, they are presented motionless in the painting. Again, the same person in graphic lines passes by.

In a conversation with the artist, I was informed that this omnipresence is the artist himself. Meimban presents himself as a nonchalant observer, a fleeting image, a rushing character who seems to overtake everyone else. The rest one can already surmise.

Norlie Meimban is graduate of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. He has mounted six solo exhibitions, this being the seventh, in a span of six years. He has participated in over thirty group exhibitions both in the Philippines and abroad. He has been reviewed extensively and featured in print and broadcast media. Meimban is successful in employing a variety of painting and graphic techniques as he worked as illustrator and animator for a number of years.