Gino Bueza

b. 1987, Philippines

Bueza studied Painting at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. Bueza was a Grand Prize winner in the 40th Shell Students’ Art Competition (Oil/Acrylic category) in 2007 and a finalist in the 2010 Tanaw: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Painting Competition and the 2006 and 2005 Shell art competitions.

It becomes clear that Bueza’s works not only present the breaking of images, disturbance of textual arrangements and transgressions of capitalist symbols. His works are not merely juvenile and stagnant translational critiques of old forms. Instead, they are transformative, even progressive. Bueza’s works are hopeful not of the romantic, starry-eyed and quixotic affinity, but of the honest and truthful kind. He reveals the scraps of the current system and the deceitfulness of existing structures, but he is also active in ingeniously creating a new possibility, a new order of things.

With the look of collage,  Bueza’s artworks are actually gathered and manipulated images from his imagination, a deliberate cropping and fragmenting of familiar forms as he draws them. With recognizable images that are fragmented, sometimes distorted, and then merged into layered juxtapositions of colour, pattern, and form.