Newspaper article on the group exhibition 'Pleasures of Painting' published in Manila Bulletin on 14 June 1994.

The exhibition was curated by Roberto Chabet at The Art Center, SM Megamall from 14 - 27 June 1994. It features works by Ronald Achacoso, Jet Melencio, Joy Melencio, Jonathan Olazo, Juni Salvador, Angel Ulama, and Trek Valdizno.

'Bound to be a major event in the visual arts this year is 'Pleasures of Painting', an exhibition of large scale oil, encaustic, and mixed-media paintings by seven young artists, each of whose extended series of space-specific works makes the show a virtual anthology of seven distinct but interactive one-man exhibitions. Innovative, provocative, and ready to take risks, these painters are in the forefront of a new generation of artists giving renewed vitality to Philippine Art.

The seven in particular are redefining the exigencies of painting in the context of the cyclical demise of the practice, and are refocusing on a sense of modernity that proceeds not from mere fashionable currentness but from an existential presentness and presence - presentness in the immediacy of the act and processes of painting, and presence in the tangibility of painting itself as physical, material object. Resurfacing too in these artists' works is a sense of the marvelous and the sublime - transcendent pleasures that have been displaced in the recent climate of political decorum.

The group manifests a broad spectrum of articulateness and intuition: from the corporeality of Jonathan Olazo's transfigurative surfaces to Ronald Achacoso's richly associative layering of archetypal signs; from the deadpan witticism of Juni Salvador's absurdist exercise in painting the ultimate sunset painting to Jose Lacambra (Jet) Melencio's poetics of elemental matter turned fetish; from the celebratory liturgy of Joy Melencio's invented icons and Angel Ulama's tightrope balance between the sacred and the profane to Trek Valdizno's ephemeral totems intervening onto three-dimensional space.

A complete assembly, the seven artists reaffirm an abiding faith in the viability of painting today as a still compelling vehicle for discourse and insights. The exhibition is a celebration of this faith.'
(From the press release written by Roberto Chabet)