Sio Montera

Free Form in Art

The issue of ‘form’ in relation to a predetermined appearance and meaning is being addressed by this artist. He believes that it is essential to dissociate the process of image-making from any pre-conceived idea, and to let form and content emerge out from the painting process itself. Thus, the act of painting would become a direct phenomenon that would, in turn, lead to self-discovery. This ‘directness in painting’ as motivated by the dictates of the artist’s passion, medium and technique, would allow the content to finally emerge.

The artist in his own way would build an open compostion, every detail of which is layered with equal intensity. An over-all field or total mass image may have no single object or shape that stands out from the total energy impact. In his process, the artist desires for ‘total-involvement’ with the act of painting. The works’ often comprise slabs of color and painterly marks that are impulsive and dynamic, and that seem to expand beyond the framing edges, as if the pictorial space were merely a section chosen at random. In this process, the artist now regards painting as an intense, unpremeditated search for the images of his creative experiences and/or emotions.

As in most of the artist's abstractions, the collection on this site are highly artistic configurations of paint masses, expressive force of texture, and color modulations characterized by a careful balance between spontaneous gesture and continual control. Having spurned conceptual design that leads to picture-making, the elements are delicately worked up from the bottom-up and from the top-down with a sense of immediacy to free form from pretty pictorial illusionism and attain a post-painterly equilibrium in art.