Bernardo Pacquing
Causal Loops
Silverlens Gallery, New York

Time—or rather, age—came to mind when I saw Bernardo Pacquing’s quietly haunting exhibition at Silverlens in New York. Age and its correlation with value are prevalent in contemporary culture. In art, as with wine, age usually adds value. Italy has for centuries centered its tourism on ancient ruins and historical art, which attract conservators to hone their craft. The Colosseum may stand for epic grandeur, in contrast to a world where most things are no longer built to last. The Chinese-language media embody our generation’s fervent obsession with youth and describe female celebrities over 35 as “well-preserved,” their “age frozen”—by this logic, we’d have “expired” before reaching half of our life expectancy. Personal upkeep certainly doesn’t have to be at the Kardashians’ level, and Pacquing’s exhibition amplified the beauty in the worn and battered.

For his first US solo exhibition, reprising the title “Causal Loops” from his 2024 exhibition at Silverlens Manila, Pacquing presented new works on canvas titled What I Have Learned From My Paintings, numbered four through eight, continuing what he began the year before. The greige, almost minimalist paintings resemble musical variations on a theme, composed of exposed canvases, found items, and concrete that spatters or pushes through gashes in the surface. Colors, sparingly used, appear in small bursts, like the yellow painted on wood in #4 (2025). While the works themselves are new, the objects they carry have lived to tell tales.