Category Archive for: arteng biswal

kultura

ruben de jesus and the simple life

a version of this is in the Arts and Books Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 9 2010.

From afar, the first thing you notice about Ruben de Jesus’ works is its colors. Reds, blues and blacks are rendered in various and unexpected hues that play around with light and shadow and emphasis. Up close, each of the pen and ink works is a story in itself, at the same time that all together they could be bound into one children’s storybook. Simpleng Buhay, Simpleng Kulay (The Alcove, Filipinas Heritage Library, Makati Avenue) seems simple enough in theory, but in reality it speaks of a complexity that’s in the artwork, and more importantly is beyond it.

The choice of the simple

Last year, de Jesus mentioned the idea of paintings on the simple life to Filipinas Heritage, and while they were excited about it, de Jesus needed to be given much space and time to do it. Sometimes it wasn’t clear how much of the work was being done, or even how many artworks there were going to be. But a year after, there are 12 framed artworks all in all, six in blue and black and six in red and black, each one working with a particular moment in rural life that might be deemed simple, if not forgotten, maybe a reminiscence, by current standards of city life and development. (more…)

kultura

layers of power in imao’s open endings

The one thing that resonates about Juan Sajid Imao’s recent work is its pain, and how this
seamlessly intertwines with strength in black and red brass sculptures that make up Open
Endings (Net Quad, Deutsche Knowledge Services Lobby, presented by Project Art and 1/off).
In a country where sculptors are few and far between, most of who work on the universal
notions of humanity and being Pinoy, there was something strikingly different about Imao’s work
here. And no, it isn’t just the fact of its colors against this building’s stark white floors. It’s the
fact of relevance and power all in a tightly knit package, ready for the taking. And you leave the
exhibit having taken so much more than the imagers of these works.
The power of sculpture
The awe in Imao’s work begins with the fact that it is in thick heavy brass, mostly in big forms –
a life-size woman’s upper body here, her whole length there, an oversized head covering what
looks like miniature versions of the U.P. oblation, oversized heads, a life-size crumpled body
of a man. The three-dimensionality of it refuses that one walk past any piece of work, forcing
the spectator to stand and stare, touch and feel, live with the works, if only for a bit. That one
moment, after all is kept by spectator and kept in check, like that tiny note you fold as tiny as
possible and keep in your wallet for good luck.
And yet, this isn’t about luck at all, what Imao talks about. In fact, if anything it is about taking
the things you need to do and actually seeing them through to their painful ends, a matter-of-
fact take on the lives we live as third world Pinoys in poor and difficult Philippines.
The power of knowing
The one thing that was unexpected in Imao’s work here is the fact that it chose to deal, not just
with our own issues as nation, but more importantly with how these issues affect us as people.
“Fight To Learn” is a sculpture of a man, arms in front of him, fists held tight, body tense. He is
wrapped and padlocked from the waist down in the head of Andres Bonifacio, painted in bright
red. The power lies in the truth that we are at the point where even knowledge doesn’t come
easy, and is only worthy of those who will struggle and fight for truths that are otherwise kept
silent.
Meanwhile “Namamaluktot” is the sculpture of a man curled up, with arms around the legs, head
bowed. On the man’s head is a piggybank slot; on his back a red slab that’s made to look like a
vault. To know that it is the one who is curled up to the point of hunger and suffering, that works
harder than the absent man who earns from him. That is nothing but powerful.
The power of living
The two pregnant bellies are Imao’s paean to how a woman’s life as mother is now lived.
In “Freedom” the small pregnant belly looks to be a separate piece, hinged onto the woman’s
body, its two doors padlocked in the middle. The irony of course is that this is called freedom,
where a woman’s body is padlocked into and by pregnancy. At the same time, the sculpture’s
comfortable stance, its stand which is made to look almost like a skirt, speaks of a freedom in its
mere being.
It’s a “A Lifetime of Letters” though that’s more powerful here. The woman’s pregnant body is
painted lengthwise with red, which is transformed into a mailbox with the opening above the
breasts, and the bellybutton as keyhole. It’s a fitting tribute to motherhood as an institution that’s
all about being left behind, with the end of pregnancy as the first instance of such, the future of
letter-writing probably its last and final instance.
The power of self
“Conversation” is two façades of a face, cut at the ears, attached to each other as if in line, the
one facing the world in black, the one behind it in red. The power of it lies in the truth of masks
and silence, what we reveal, who we actually are. The silence of it lies as well in the fact of its
being a closed unit, the conversation is between your two selves, the ones that’s out there, and
the one that’s only yours.
“Call” is a one-dimensional face with mouth wide open, eyeholes left hollow. It is at once an
image of a man in distress, as it is of one in an act of revolt and rebellion, the scream as always
an act of survival. That we scream is a measure of how alive we are, how sure of ourselves,
how important it is to continue to fight.
And this is the gift that you take home with you in the face of this open ending. That Imao
himself is suffering a condition that might lead to his blindness, adds another layer of power to
this exhibit, as it does add another layer of humanity – and truth – to yours. Every other sculptor
would be hard put to beat that, eyesight notwithstanding.

The one thing that resonates about Juan Sajid Imao’s recent work is its pain, and how this seamlessly intertwines with strength in black and red brass sculptures that make up Open Endings (Net Quad, Deutsche Knowledge Services Lobby, presented by Project Art and 1/of, now at 1/of Gallery, Serendra, Taguig City).

In a country where sculptors are few and far between, most of who work on the universal notions of humanity and being Pinoy, there was something strikingly different about Imao’s work here. And no, it isn’t just the fact of its colors against this building’s stark white floors. It’s the fact of relevance and power all in a tightly knit package, ready for the taking. And you leave the exhibit having taken so much more than the imagers of these works. (more…)

kultura

Heroism and cliche in Looking for Juan 2010

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 31 2010.

It is everything and fantastic this CANVAS project that is Looking For Juan. After all, the overwrought discussion of identity seems to be at a dead-end, where insisting on Filipino-ness is adjudged too nativist and always anti-America. This forgets that when we insist on being part our colonizers, there seems to be a refusal to deal with looking at our identities as separate still from these colonizers. Meanwhile it’s easy to see why we’ve arrived at this roadblock.

And yet, this year Looking for Juan (Vargas Museum, U.P. Diliman) is in a bigger, brighter (also hotter) venue (where are those rich UP alumni to air-condition this place when you need them?), and doesn’t seem to want to stop with talking about identity. But maybe too much of a good thing can be bad?

Because with the question of everyday heroes, cliché is the name of this game. It doesn’t help that the way in which the exhibit was curated grouped the works thematically, making the clichés more obviously about sameness. And when I say that there are paintings that are the same, I mean the artistic individual creativities (difference in media, notions of genre) get dissolved in the stark similarities, of imagery, of thought-process, of just basic idea.

Workers as working heroes

Name it, and you’ve got that Filipino worker here. There are no call center agents, or yuppies, or any enslaved white-collar workers thought, instead there are images of the kargador, the fisherman, the farmer, the magtataho, the teacher, the health worker, the basurero (that last one is a sculpture). One wonders at what point it becomes less respectful and more a politically-incorrect romance with these images. After all, these workers aren’t given lives other than the work they do, and in the few paintings that show workers’ conditions, badly-written captions that accompany the work ruin things altogether.

Thank goodness for “Minimum Wage Earner” by Renato Barja, where the construction worker is rightfully the color of the soot that he creates and lives with, where he is given a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a fiery sunrise in the background, where his big eyes are allowed its sadness and its weariness, even more importantly its defeat. Where the last thing you will think of is celebration or romance, or cliché.

Jojo Ballo’s “Tuwing Umaga”, which uses charcoal on canvas, would’ve been more powerful left without its caption cum explanation. Maan de Loloya’s “Kargador” meanwhile, fails at its cleanliness, which doesn’t work as irony for what it is that the main image is doing, i.e., carrying on top of her head a “crime scene” of her oppressive past and present: an MMDA sign, pink stilettos, guns, a balikbayan box, a buwaya. Had this been dirtier it would make sense that the smaller versions of this character look up dumbfounded at, some are apathetic towards, this bigger image’s act of cleaning up.

The cliché of the OFW, and motherhood

Because we know this to be true: that the OFW is the new hero of nation. And so, there are a good number of works here that are all about this heroism, and while some do fail at bringing something new to the OFW stereotype, there are those that just succeed. Yveese Belen’s “In Every Corner” is a canvas divided into 8 x 4 square, with every other square filled with an image of tiny brown workers doing various jobs. What is extraordinary here is the detail where the workers are actually in action, doing their jobs, making it more of a tribute to what they do, versus a romantic notion of just them.

The other OFW paintings don’t quite survive their captions, although Cana Valencia’s “Bagong Bayani” does just because it’s a different image compared to all the others here: much of the canvas is taken up by a Swiss knife made into the Philippine flag, the sun used as the O to the FW. From this center, what the knife’s various tools reveal are Filipinos’ various jobs across the world. It’s everything and refreshing, removing the sadness implicit in the mere fact of OFWs.

And those mother images? All about the clichés of pregnancy and giving life, or holding the child’s hand and protecting her, of motherhood as powerful in itself, period. That might be true, but there are so many other ways in which mothers are heroes, that would’ve been nice to see, too.

Some powerful imagery

Dante Lerma’s “Call Juan-24/7-Heroes” has such a powerful image that’s failed by its title and caption. A woman in a Maria Clara costume stands against a Coca-Cola refrigerator. Her foot is up against the wall, revealing running shoes, and she is holding her phone as if writing a text message. From afar, it was easily a rendering of the notion(s) of womanhood and tradition, the powerful woman vis a vis the meek and tamed. With that title about heroes being on call? It is everything and disappointing.

Cathy Lasam’s “Mommy” is wonderful in its experimentation with texture, folding up paper to create a pattern that renders the quiet – and I daresay cliché – image of the mother more dynamic, more interestingly alive and truthful to the multi-dimensionality of all our mothers in our lives. Janelle Tang’s “May Bago Akong Laruan” layers acrylic on canvas to create the layers of a paper doll. Here, the clothes floating on the canvas create the images of a mother and a child, even when they don’t exist on the page itself. The heroism would lie in the idea of powerfully creating our own images, yes? But that caption is an absolute let-down.

Fernando Sena’s “Tatay, Nanay, Mga Tunay na Bayani” was a refreshing complexity in the midst of these works, where abstraction seemed to be few and far between. Sena’s take on the cliché of parents as heroes is done in cubist abstraction, where two tiny one-dimensional faces represent parents, that create what look like structures that go up higher and higher, evolving into darker, deeper, more serious colors, as it goes up the canvas. It’s a celebration of the default power of parenting to build, to create, regardless of whether it wants to or not; it’s a reminder, maybe even a warning.

The universal Pinoy hero

What becomes infinitely more problematic here though is the idea of every Filipino as hero. It is here that the paintings seem to all work towards the media-created notion that we can all change this world just by voting once. As if things are ever that easy. Here, laughter is celebrated even when it’s really more a negative than a positive in the way that it fails to consider oppression. There is the teacher, the student-journalist, the environmentalist. There are hands! Just too many notions of hands, both in titles and captions, and outright in images that we’ve all seen before, some of them in our grade school art projects.

The ones that survive this part of the exhibit are those works that have different images, even when these titles and/or captions want to kill the work altogether. Dante Aligaen’s “It’s In Our Hands (It Always Was)” is a black and white mixed media work of a skull from which emanates a halo and the rays of a sun, flowers/grass/weeds spewing out from the main image, and bombs ready to fall from the sky. It’s a fascinating take on pride and yabang, the kind that can get us all messed up about what’s good and what’s evil.

Liza Flores’ “You, Me” could’ve done with a more creative title and less of a caption, because it is wonderful in itself, where the notion of reflection works both with and without another, except for oneself, where the dark and cold and the bright and sunny seem to be one and the same, versus being two sides of the same coin, where heroism is ultimately about staying where you are, regardless of how difficult, or how seemingly easy.

The rest of the many works here insist that we can all be heroes, be it through images of Rizal (too many of them, too!) or through the images of the youth as the future. But while this seems wonderful, the idea of our own individual heroisms at this point doesn’t seem all that possible, does it? Maybe it isn’t even truthful, as it is more than anything about romance and false hopes? Buen Calubayan’s “Pinger” seems to be the answer. It’s nothing but a black tarpaulin with an enlarged red digital print of the artist’s dirty finger, accompanied by this line: “Ako ang simula ng pagbabago? O panggagago?”

How’s that for a caption that works.

kultura

when ‘i love you’ is enough

Not quite impressed with the valentine exhibit at Manila Contemporary in February – save for Angelo Suarez’s “Not the Object, But the Energy It Consumes Over Time” and Rachel Rillo’s “Keep It Taut” – I was ready to be disappointed in the I Love You exhibit at Hiraya Gallery (530 UN Avenue, Ermita, Manila). But I was impressed, at the works that were there, bound together by the idea and act of saying “I loveyou”. The sculptures should’ve been an indication: Agnes Arellano’s “Kissing Yabyum” was clean white and sexy; and Ramon Orlina’s “Father’s Delight” seemed to be in action, dancing joyfully to its notion of i-love-you. I was in for a good show.

A funny kind of lovin’

Ronald Caringal’s “Love is in the air, or the source of it” is a funny take on love doggie-style, that is, an image of a real dog smelling the behind of a stuffed dog. Against a dark backdrop with cartoon-like dogs, and “I love you” in tiny red letters, this takes a jab at our own humanly acts of saying I love you when it is based on the way something looks versus what something is. (more…)