VICTOR BALANON

Feature Artist

Victor Balanon (born 1972, Manila, Philippines) started to study Dental Medicine at the University of the East in 1989. He left school however, a year short of finishing his studies, choosing to pursue and develop his interest in art. A self-taught artist, he has worked as an illustrator creating artworks for film, independent comics and underground music labels. He later studied film and animation at the Mowelfund Film Institute producing two animated short films as a result.

During this time, he has also created a self-published comic-book anthology and started working on his serialized pen and ink drawings. He was invited to be a part of the seminal late-90’s art space/collective Surrounded by Water, where some of the more prominent, contemporary artists of today have started their practice. He has participated in various groups shows ever since, both here and abroad, handling his time between his day job as a (hand-drawn) key animator and in producing his own art.

His series, The Nameless Hundred (see above), is inspired by and refers to Max Ernst's La Femme 100 Tetes. Like Ernst's work, this series is also made up of collaged images appropriated from film stills, history journals and pictures from the internet. Utilizing modernist forms such as surrealism & dada, constructivism and futurism- both in the fields of visual arts and cinema- these pieces allude to a speculative history of a realized Utopian dream.

He is self-taught in the visual arts and has started producing video art with animated content. His works have been collected by the Singapore Art Museum.

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Victor Balanon now lives and works in Quezon City, Metromanila, with his wife and 2 kids.