Erving Del Pilar
Myth and Musings: A Personal Journey in Collages

July 28 - August 19, 2023

Mixed Paper Media Collage

Artist Statement

The explanation to my collages has two parts.

The first part, the more mundane part, involves my move to Virginia  from New York City. When I moved all my possessions down here I  had boxes filled with art-related material and paraphernalia. It also  contained gallery announcements, postcards, hand-written letters from  relatives, friends, former girlfriends, college notebooks, travel souvenirs, and old  journals. These boxes were things I had lugged around for years, and  their existence became more apparent the more boxes I acquired  during the move. A Japanese friend suggested the Kon Mari Method,  wherein one were to take objects that one has kept forever and excise  them from our lives through a ritual of properly saying goodbye. Being  the sentimental sap that I am I couldn’t just get rid of them. So, I had  to figure out a way to make them exist in another form, and allow them  to resonate better in my life, as opposed to just having all these things  in boxes.

The second part is the more esoteric and scholarly aspect of this  series. As a student of painting for years I consider myself belonging  to the Surrealist school that pointed to “dream” imageries and the  metaphysical. The subject matter I dealt with harks back to Dali, De  Chirico, Magritte, Max Ernst, and the like. However, if we are to look at  the origins of Surrealism, it actually began with Automatism, or  automatic writing, which was used by poets and writers who were part  of the European avant grade movement. The power of words, used in  a syntax-less manner, were experimented with but became eventually  limited. Thus, in the early practices of Dada and Surrealism, images  were eventually included—giving birth to collages, and eventually to assemblages. This new visual device helped push the bounds of what  words and imagery can evoke when juxtaposed next to each other.  This concept is what made me utilize the contents of that box that I  found hard to part with. The ensuing work elevated the disparate  paper media into a chronicle of a life devoted to aesthetic and  introspective inquiry. Ultimately, what comes out is a fragmented but  evocative depiction of our personal mythos.

— Erving Del PIlar

Biography

Erving F. Del Pilar was born in Manila, Philippines, who then came to the U.S.A. at the age of fourteen. His immigrant family landed in Queens, New York in 1972, and there he stayed until 2018, the year he left for Williamsburg, Virginia. He began drawing at the age of nine trying to mimic his aunt studying architectural drafting, then taught himself the fundamentals of oil painting at sixteen. He spent two years of high school at the Manila Science High School in the Philippines, and another two at William Cullen Bryant High School in Long Island City, New York. He graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in Visual Arts in 1983, and earned his M.F.A. at School of Visual Arts in 1988, both in New York City. He went on to become gainfully employed as a graphic designer in corporate advertising until he retired from the profession in 2018. He continues to paint, make collages, and is currently editing a novel he began a decade ago. When he is not traveling, Erving avidly studies chess, art history, languages, gastronomy and oenology.

Website: ervingdelpilar.com
Flickr: flickr.com/photos/ervingdelpilar