‘The Passerby’ at Artinformal Gallery
By Sean Carballo

“Surfaces loom and then recede,” writes Pristine de Leon in an accompanying essay to Alvin Zafra’s latest solo show at Artinformal Gallery, ‘The Passerby,’ which runs from 5 October to 3 November 2023. Mapping out the movements and impressions of an artist in the city, de Leon’s essay is populated with traffic lights, bicycles on the road, and trains filled to the brim with tired commuters. We encounter the artist as he attempts to photograph a city, its phantom architecture ‘buoyed by shadows that dissolve permanence into passing light.’ The essay, in its sullen descriptions of the city, latches onto the urban ennui which Zafra’s works revolve around.

Lyrical and evocative, the essay functions doubly as a mood primer on Zafra’s own artistic preoccupations: the disquiet of the city acting as the artist’s steadfast muse. Past works like ‘Aurora’ (2016) and ‘Miragen’ (2015) pursued settings such as railway stations and vacant edifices, captured gradually by hand with a grainy photorealism. ‘Monopolis,’ Zafra’s 2016 solo show at Art Basel Hong Kong, which portrayed an array of crammed streets, billboards, and decrepit walls, was inspired by the artist’s bicycle rides around Metro Manila. Piercing through this disquiet is a fervent regard for light and the transformations it makes happen. How light asserts itself amidst the busyness of daily living. How shadows trace light’s fugitive presence.

Alvin Zafra, ‘The Passerby’, 2023, white stone and sandpaper, 64.77 x 53.34cm (framed). Image courtesy of the artist and Artinformal Gallery.

Across an artistic career that spans two decades, the search for light—that fleeting source of life—has been the persistent focus of Zafra’s work, and ‘The Passerby’ continues his exploration of light and its urban vestiges through his trademark etchings on sandpaper.

Zafra describes these etchings, a method of working which he has meticulously practiced over the years, as “object/medium.” With this approach, everyday objects such as stones, pencils, and sandpaper assume the role of the medium to create an artwork, and in turn collapses the physicality of an object with the actual practice of creating art. Zafra’s object/medium is intuitive and spontaneous as he latches onto materials and media closer at hand to grapple with flashing feelings and scenarios, often violent in nature.

Alvin Zafra, ‘Boundary’, 2023, white stone and sandpaper, 81.28 x 101.6cm (framed). Image courtesy of the artist and Artinformal Gallery.

Zafra originally developed this method while he was in college since traditional art materials were so expensive. His thesis, ‘Argument from Nowhere’ (2000), consisted of footage of him grinding a human skull against sandpaper, marking the sandpaper’s surface with pulverised human remains. In succeeding works, he has deployed handgun bullets and fingernails, marking them against sandpaper to create visceral imprints.

Alvin Zafra, ‘Fountainhead’, 2023, white stone and sandpaper, 67.31 x 82.55cm (framed). Image courtesy of the artist and Artinformal Gallery.

‘The Passerby’ does not overhaul this approach but deepens it. Zafra’s tableaus have grown in subtlety and detail, and his landscapes have acquired a melancholic softness. Using sandpaper as his default canvas, Zafra begins with a backdrop of darkness where, eventually, a play of light and shadow can be delicately staged. His subjects—wage laborers, roads, architecture—are brought into a subdued focus, his canvases yielding a ghostly yet affirming ambiance.

Works such as ‘Ghost Train’ (2023) and ‘Mirage’ (2023) feature desolate and abandoned settings. A gasoline station is deserted, save for a couple of cars parked at the back. Food stalls stand without a customer in sight. But what gives these pieces their vitality is Zafra’s point of view, galvanised by an attentiveness to texture and chiaroscuro. Despite working with limitations of canvas size and palette, Zafra’s observant gaze gives rise to distinctly eerie impressions of the city and its movements.

When figures do materialise, they emerge wraith-like and transient like silhouettes dissipating before one’s eyes. In ‘The Provider,’ (2023) a profile of a young boy surfaces amid a construction site scenery. Elsewhere, a ghoulish face creeps out of nowhere in ‘The Passerby,’ (2023) a bloodless aura resembling an apparition. These macabre presences flesh out Zafra’s vision of the city. We come to understand the city as ephemeral and cryptic terrain, revealing flickers of itself and then concealing back into the ether. Inhabited by strange and roguish shadows, the city harbours an unnameable unrest that shoots through every frame of the show.

Alvin Zafra, ‘Mirage’, 2023, white stone and sandpaper, 84.46 x 104.78cm (framed). Image courtesy of the artist and Artinformal Gallery.

Another recurrent interest of the exhibition is architecture. Zafra’s prior project at Artinformal, titled ‘Analemma,’ drew inspiration from geometric shapes and seemed to map faintly abstract outlines of site markers and monuments. With this current show, Zafra favours more material, graspable imagery. The piece ‘Boundary’ (2023) centres itself on a skewed monument and a jeepney making its way in front of it. The monument reveals itself to be some futuristic beacon and contrasts with the jeepney’s rough and homespun structure, making explicit modernity’s highly uneven conditions.

Meanwhile, ‘Fountainhead’ (2023) showcases an ongoing construction site with a building’s scaffolding and infrastructure in the process of being made. Zafra is interested in these built and soon-to-be-built environments perhaps because they too seem like spectres, lingering traces of a city in decline where humanity has been sucked dry by the churn of constant and unceasing progress.

“The tonal consistency across the exhibition—its lonesome and murky sceneries—hints at an uneasy, ambiguous grief kept alive by passers-by of all kinds.”

Taken as a whole, this is a work of deep-seated alienation. The tonal consistency across the exhibition—its lonesome and murky sceneries—hints at an uneasy, ambiguous grief kept alive by passers-by of all kinds. Glinting with an ache for light, Zafra’s show reminds me of the oracular lines from the Louise Gluck poem ‘Day Without Night’: “The context / of truth is darkness.” The work of grasping for truth in the midst of darkness—and there’s a deliberate tactility to Zafra’s manner of grasping—remains one of the most alluring aspects of the show. Those truths lurking inside the city hangs in the air, elusive and gnomic, but sustaining all the same.

‘The Passerby’ is on view at Artinformal Gallery in Makati City from 5 October to 3 November 2023. Click here for more information.