MANILA, Philippines - it is often all too easy to dismiss the humble doodle as an inconsequential transgression of the visual plane, an absent-minded expression born of the monotonous moment.

But doodles do have great incipient value and for many creative geniuses, doodling is a necessary activity that can spark grander visions.

In “Elementary,” on view July 4-19 at E Galerie (2/F Shops at Serendra, Fort Bonifacio, Global City, Taguig; tel. 9153840 or 0922-8511354), artist Julien Tan presents 10 paintings on three-square-feet canvases rendered in a distinct asemic style, jubilantly mischievous in tenor, and richly poignant in its evocation of boyhood memories.

“As a kid I used to fill our walls with drawings of airplanes and bicycles,” Tan recalls. “Pentel pen pa nga ang gamit ko noon, kaya hindi sila agad nabubura.”

Tan enrolled at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, in Visual Communication, and earned his degree in 1991. Even with this educational background, Tan was a late bloomer in painting, staging his first solo exhibit only in 2001.

“It took a while for art to find me,” he explains. For art and artist, that meeting point was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1999, when Tan first came face to face with masterpieces by the abstract expressionists of the New York School, among them Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly.

The impact of that early engagement almost a decade ago clearly resonates in Tan’s latest works which, in contrast to those in his debut, appear to be more confident and carefree in both theme and technique.

And, while figurative drawings appear and are central images on his canvases, they are rendered alongside a cornucopia of cryptic words, aggressive textures and smudges of sprightly, pastel colors.

This gobbledygook aesthetic is doodling at its embryonic best, portents of things to come, but perhaps more significantly for the artist, emotionally charged signifiers of things that were.

“In my new works I attempt to assemble different pigments of childhood memories on one canvas,” Tan explains.

Thus, in “Basinton St.,” “Riding alone at Noon,” and “Bike and Banana Que,” the bicycle is a recurring icon that suggests the nostalgia of youthful freedom, mobility and adventure.

In the cryptic piece dubbed “Afrem,” Tan resurrects the 1960s boy doll-action figure Johnny Hero awash in a sea of scribbles and red and yellow paint.

And, in “Breakfast at La Fueza,” depicting a large can of liver spread, Tan pays homage to familial rituals and cheap gastronomic delights.

Indeed, in these playful paintings Tan is the tour guide for grownups who find Neverland, an enchanted kingdom where time stands still and all caution is thrown to the wind.

Although Tan lays claim to these vignettes of memories, there is something vaguely familiar in all of them. Like those daydreams we thoughtlessly drew on the margins of grade-school notebooks, Tan’s paintings are often illegible but mostly surprising reminders of innocence and our untroubled days growing up.

“Sometimes, I have difficulty letting go of my paintings,” Tan shares. “These are my memories and I don’t know where they will go.”