"In the collection, Montera works with all the painterly techniques he has acquired from here and from the conditions he worked with while he was abroad. Letting his creativity loose, he combines his reductive technique with his earlier additive techniques of building texture and using straight swathes, lines, and grids that have largely been absent in his work while he was in Taiwan, which gives many of the works in this exhibition a solidity and definiteness which were eschewed in his “second phase” works.

His somber colors are giving way to more tropical colors, hinting not only at the accelerated pace of weathering, but of abundance, and the frenetic history-making that his present condition, and indeed our own country’s, is experiencing, which makes it harder to examine and be critical of.

Perhaps, more than the certainty of the realistic painting, Montera’s works are more attuned to the zeitgeist of our times where certainty is a luxury, but the will to carry on, despite manifold disparities, is always apparent."