Nona Garcia

The work is in good condition overall, as is the canvas, which is clear and taut. There are indication of minor wear and handling around the edges. The paint layers are stable and well preserved. Under ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of retouching. Unframed, on stretcher.
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The paint has started to come off  from the wall while a part of the ceiling, hanging on dearly, is at the brink of  collapse in this run-down bedroom from a deserted place. The light enters through the window past the crooked curtains in the same manner a faint breeze enters the room, like air entering a lung for its last gasp. 'Once, there was life here'—is what it seems to portray, and the last attempt at survival is what has been immortalized through painting what has remained. And as Nona Garcia continue to redefine  the subject's presence in painting, this is the presence she tries to capture in her work, Stay; where  presence seemed more like moments ago, even though  traces of life may have been days, years, or  decades—since the last person stood and walked away from that room.  The unmade bed, the disorderly condition, seem to speak not of the desolation of the place but the energy that lingered in an unkempt room caused by life's bustle upon waking.

With this, as well as her other paintings of interior spaces, she employs the method of photographing the scene before painting them:

“I base my paintings of these places on  photographs I have taken that depict the transformation of space after habitation, when objects left behind lay claim to a new identity—as both remnant and evidence from something that has suddenly ceased to be. And in the randomness of their arrangement in space comes out a final structure which through painting,  becomes fixed, immovable relics.”

This process exceeds the documentary-like quality in taking pictures as the final image painted in photo-realistic manner gives new meaning to the banality of the verité in a snapshot, as there becomes something more to looking at an unadulterated actuality of the incidental in a photograph. The disarray becomes the misc-en-scene, the deterioration becomes the painstaking design, the accidental under or over-exposed lighting becomes the relevant tonal and color-scheme instead. Rather than becoming a depiction of a photograph, it becomes instead, a painting of that moment the picture was taken.

This almost neutral painting undermines the several qualities we seek out of a worthy subject: a centerpiece, a hint of action, an illumination through color. But where the subject's presence/absence is at the very core of Nona Garcia's delicate approach to seek out the possibilities of portrayal, we've been handed with a great paradox—how can this painting of such scale and verisimilitude lay almost hidden in shadowy details, barely recognizable, yet still explode in our view? And it can strike us like a film noir's ominous set,  a  tragic portrait of emptiness, or maybe as an allusion to germinating hope. But in Nona's mind she might have known, that she did not just stumble upon a broken down and badly lit room, but into a scale model of   a lost civilization in ruins. 

-Cocoy Lumbao