Exhibitions

For “Midsummer Night”, Averil Paras explores his unique fairytale tableaux style within a modern context allowing the artist’s fascination with storytelling to unfold.

The works employ a highly detailed visual language drawn from a wide and continually evolving range of influences, including surrealism, graphic design, medieval illuminated manuscripts, mid-century modernism and Victorian imagery. Flora and fauna unfurl across Paras’ canvas, giving way to a magical world of figures in fanciful dresses and crowns. The canvases are collaged with fragments of various patterned-like bright mosaics; and busy, tiled compositions – something which Paras successfully executes with astounding technical proficiency.

Despite its whimsical appearance, the artworks are strongly rooted in the literary and theatrical influences of Romanticism, as well as in the cultural depictions of the Victorian era. Among the most significant of these influences were the fantasy themes of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

The performative power of Averil Paras’ art is suspended by the fact that his works do not pretend to represent reality but disclose themselves as fiction. His paintings explore the idea that the basic human drive to ornament the material world is fundamentally innate, irresistible, and, at its core, motivated by deeper impulses to understand the meaning of life and to experience a universal, elemental and essential reality.

“Midsummer Night” by Averil Paras will be on view from July 8 to 17, 2019 with the Artist Reception scheduled for Wednesday, July 10 at 6PM. The gallery is located on the 3rd level of The Podium, ADB Avenue, Ortigas Center, Mandaluyong City. For inquiries, contact Galerie Joaquin at (+63)2 6347954 or (+63)2 7239418 or email podium.galeriejoaquin@gmail.com.