Born and raised in the province of Batangas, MOON BUENDÍA is a Filipino artist, whose creative work runs a stream of contemporary poetry and nature photography. As we take a closer look in his photographic works―including those early pieces dated 2014―Moon unravels his personal depiction of 'visual prose'. To him, this touches on the innate intention of the author to representation―whatever one decides to create or document, the end in mind is expression. 'Visual prose' is rather a paradox to the suppressed music and air of exclusivity resulting from his seemingly inward and unassuming approach.
Moon's high regard to creative expression tells us that art is fluid and breathing, taking one form to another. His work should not be looked at individually but rather, collectively as they make up an ode to the environment. Moon reminds that even the minute and mundane things, if we just open our senses, weave an invisible thread to the natural world.
Reposing in virgin forests taught Moon Buendía to get away from life and focus on living, saying every turnaway from the life we know leads to its rediscovery.
He has sad eyes that have seen sad things, mirrored by the collection of his photographs he took in his every solitary descent deep into the woods, where, smothered in peace, he found that man is essentially alone.
The photographs are an ode to the otherwise mundane things, music we don’t have time to listen to, from simple to elaborate: the formation in the water, the bark of a tree, the canopy against the sky, the porosity of leaves, lilies drifting gingerly across the river.
It could be a low-hanging flower, creeping vines, a heroic shoot arduously squeezing out of a concrete wall.
Or it could be an overgrowth of moss, something that he says is an abstraction of life, of which photographs you can see every day and have different interpretations each time.
The moss, Moon said, tells us a lot about life's grotesque denouement, of nature chewing its own leg to survive: death, "but, in death, a new life emerges," he said. Because, indeed, it is an echt lonely planet, and if nature and Moon's photography could teach us a lesson, it is that we are merely passing by.
— Artist review by VERNON VELASCO
ARTIST'S BLOG