Maria Taniguchi’s solo exhibition “body of work” traces her fascination with the ways that time and space can be structurally composed and emotively perceived through a weightless insinuation of materiality. The artist presents her hallmark paintings—depicting tightly stacked blocks—in dialogue with new hanging sculptures of ethereal circles and lines of wood, as well as a collection of “video notes,” in which Taniguchi visually jots down her musings on the connections among material, form, and gesture. Invoking the spirit of Filipino craftsmanship, particularly its resourcefulness, Taniguchi generates a discourse on the generative and disintegrative duality of materials.
Leaning against the walls of MCAD’s ground floor were selected examples from the more than two-hundred paintings that so far make up the “Untitled (Brick Paintings)” series, 2008–. From afar, they loom like black portals into the universe’s infinite void: smooth, flat, and unwavering. Upon closer inspection, their monolithic facade unravels into a network of multiplied geometric shapes that resemble bricks. Here, Taniguchi repetitively renders each stroke as a strict rectangle—a foundational unit for metaphorical space-making. Thanks to her meticulous and reiterative execution, the seemingly expansive black void transforms into a manageable puzzle, lenient toward deconstruction and reassembling. Perched between meditative representation and obsessive mark-making, Taniguchi’s painting conveys her patient attempt to capture and interpret abstract space.
Taniguchi continues to pursue her experimentation with space and perception in “Runaways,” 2024—large-scale sculptures made from duhat (java plum) wood that invoke the fundamental visual elements: circles and straight lines, zeros and ones. Hung in a line from one end of the space to the other, they etched overlapping silhouettes into space, forming constellations that merged, broke up, then reconstituted as viewers shifted position. Taniguchi thus extended the boundaries of her mark-making practice by adopting empty space as an experimental canvas, a space in which viewers can immerse themselves as they weave through the loosely structured orchestration of minimal yet potent elements.
At the core of Taniguchi’s engagement with time and space is her unremitting fascination with how materials can connect, influence, and activate collective microhistories. Her cluster of thought-journaling videos, composed of scattered images and sound bites woven into loops, explores the intricate nexus of material and site. In Mies 421, 2010, Taniguchi uses sequences of black-and-white shots of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion to explore his use of marble and its broader place in modernity. While visiting the pavilion, Taniguchi became intrigued by Georg Kolbe’s sculpture Der Morgen (Dawn), 1929, particularly the figure’s ambiguous hand gesture. Her meditations prompted her journey to Romblon Island, the Philippines’ marble capital, to re-create the sculpture at different marble workshops. Untitled (Dawn’s Arms), 2011, hinges upon the moment when a Romblon sculptor’s hand carved a replica of Der Morgen, gesturing toward the connections, through material transference, between Spain and the Philippines. In the video Untitled (Celestial Motors), 2012, Taniguchi delves into an icon of Filipino modernity, the jeepney—a local vehicle crafted from scrap materials, including fragments of military Jeeps left behind in the Philippines after World War II. Each of the country’s regions has developed its unique form of jeepney. Taniguchi moves her camera along the surface of a Laguna model jeepney in the manner of a luxury-car commercial, semi-satirically accentuating each element of this complex vehicle to highlight not only her fascination with its craftsmanship, but also her interest in the hybridity embedded in Filipino modernity.
