Dr. Patrick Flores, chief curator of National Gallery Singapore, and project director and co-curator of Fernando Zóbel: Order is Essential. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery Singapore.
With Fernando Zóbel: Order is Essential, the chief curator of National Gallery Singapore brings his ideas on space, storytelling, and interpretation into focus, offering visitors a new way to experience art and abstraction
Dr. Patrick Flores knows his languages, six to be exact. The fascination started with a childhood curiosity about how translators and interpreters work, and the 1977 Disney film, The Rescuers. Much of its charm, for him, was about how mice Bernard and Bianca showed a preview of the inner workings of a mouse organization within the United Nations.
“I was drawn to how things were done at the United Nations, which for me was an amazing assembly of diplomats,” shares Dr. Flores, learning about how different languages are spoken and needed translation and interpretation. “I was attracted to both the meanings of words and the words themselves. The more uncommon, the more intriguing for me. And when the word was foreign, it was enchanting because it was somewhat arcane, obscure, enigmatic, [and] something unique.”
As his family moved between the Visayas islands, a then-young Patrick learned to speak three Visayan languages before settling in Manila. In the capital region, he learned his fourth language, Tagalog, followed by his fifth, English. As a university student, Spanish was his sixth idioma.
“These layers of languages shaped me,” he reflects. “When I finally majored in Humanities with a focus on the arts, such fascination with language, both lived and dreamed of, found its contexts, a kind of gravity that rooted it in history and society, and the very material of art, which is likewise a language itself.”
Dr. Flores ponders this phase of his life as an alternation between the strange and the enlightening. It was also what would mold his curatorial practice as “the interest in the unknown, and maybe ultimately unknowable, and the desire to understand by bringing eccentric, maybe untranslatable, things together.”
That spirit of interpretation is central to Fernando Zobel: Order is Essential, the National Gallery Singapore’s current landmark exhibition on Philippine-born Spanish artist Fernando Zóbel. For Dr. Flores, the title of the exhibition (taken from an interview with the abstract artist’s interlocutor Rafael Pérez-Madero) was more than a concept.
“In the interview, Zóbel creates this delicate symmetry between order and beauty in the Japanese sense. So, at the outset, order is not to be strictly confined to a certain rigidity or unyielding rigor, something that is programmatic or an iron-clad grammar,” explains Dr. Flores, emphasizing that order, for the late abstract artist, was woven into essence or the essential.
Spatial design was also a consideration in channeling the core of Zóbel’s exhibition. In the Cuenca section, where the Philippine-born artist’s late abstract works dwell, Flores and his team reimagined the space to match that energy.
“Spatially, the exhibition became something like Zóbel’s immaculate but luminous studio in Cuenca, open to the generosity of all-over light and breathing space. We wanted light to emanate from the painting, and not to light the painting.”
Dr. Patrick Flores
As for his role as a curator, Dr. Flores sees how language returns in how he thinks about the curator’s role, not as a single voice, but as one part of a larger conversation. “The curator initiates a conversation, advances an argument, and calibrates a cadence or rhythm. The curatorial voice should be part of a polyphony.”
To curate, in Dr. Flores’ view, is not to impose clarity, but to hold space for complexity, not just announcing an array of pictures. “An abstract work is a proposition of a new world. Curators need to offer sufficient space for this world to emerge and play out. A generous space also encourages reflection and introspection, which restrained works require.”
Fernando Zóbel: Order is Essential runs from May 9 to November 30, 2025 at the Wu Guanzhong Gallery and Level 4 Gallery at National Gallery Singapore and is presented in close collaboration with Fundación Juan March and the Ayala Museum. For more information, visit National Gallery Singapore’s official website.
