Pintô Art Museum, in collaboration with ArtistSpace, proudly presents Brain Break, the latest exhibition featuring the lush, chromatically vibrant, and encompassing works of JC Intal 7. This solo exhibition marks a significant progression in Intal’s artistic journey, showcasing a departure from his earlier abstract explorations to a more pronounced engagement with the infinite possibilities of color.

In Brain Break, the artist unleashes his pure abstract energies to capture the weight and heft of pure color. The exhibition title itself alludes to how these paintings provide a much-needed “break” from the monotonous world of forms. Intal’s journey into the art world, starting with the resounding success of his debut show, reflects his courage and determination to venture into a different discipline while paying homage to his basketball roots.

Color, reigning supreme in Intal’s works, is not only visual but tactile, evoked through concentrations, blobs, smudges, swirls, and thick applications of pigment. His paintings are charged with a fierce sense of finding order amid the chaos, of drawing the eye to every square inch of space, as if the chance encounters underscored by abstraction were pushed toward the point of inevitability.

For this exhibition, Intal ventures into mixed media, incoporating objects as a way to amplify the complexity of his works. In one work, a painter’s brush is seen to be integrated in the hectic textures of a canvas, as if to underscore how the artist’s movements, techniques, and tools have now become indistinguishable from each other.

The impasto, which has become Intal’s trademark, once again rises confidently from the pictorial surface of the works, whose troughs and crests provide their own interactions with shadow and light. The artist’s sheer exuberance and freedom in engaging with his material are evident, drawing parallels between his studio and a basketball court.

Intal, in viewing his art, states that it is a zone where he can create with utmost freedom and invest his full attention to his craft. Brain Break invites viewers to partake in this freedom as well as experience the vibrant and evolving artistic language of JC Intal 7, offering a visual break from the ordinary and an immersive dive into the world of pure abstraction, color, and self-reflection.

-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana