< width="184" height="276" align="left" src=" reality. " alt="" /> Advertising Renaissance man and adobo columnist Cid Reyes recently opened his 14th solo painting exhibit at the West Gallery at SM Mega Mall. Entitled “Perceptions/Reality,” Cid’s exhibit is an allusion to the classic Rolling Stones Magazine advertising campaign, where he attempts through his paintings to dialogue on the dichotomies between representation and abstraction.
Cid’s collection on show is a series of abstractions that use human visages and cityscapes as references. From Baudelaire and Rilke to El Greco and De Chirico, the inspirations are enough to intimidate the pretentious. The highly textured and tightly nuanced paintings, done in acrylic epoxy spray, have led Business Mirror writer and art lover Alice Guillermo to make the association in her critique to “stains on the ceiling, “after an apocryphal tale about Leonardo de Vinci’s creative epiphanies while on his sickbed, his expansive imagination stirred by simply staring at the ceiling of his room.
As an intellectualized abstraction of balance and color—the palette of his show ranges from an extra-large white-on-white meditation to a selection of black-and-gold scholasticisms and fiery solar-inspired exuberances—Cid’s work is best appreciated in the manner of Miyamoto Musashi, the famous Japanese samurai of the 16th century. Warrior, artist and philosopher, Musashi offered the sage advice that “it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distant view of close things.”
Indeed, it is in contextual quietude that the amorphous become substantiated through the mirror-glass of knowledge and experience. This is when Cid’s paintings somehow manage to engage the art lover in ways rather surprising and delightful. And this is the Eureka moment of Cid’s artistry. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, reality is perception, albeit a very persistent illusion.
