Tag Archives: contemporary Pinoy art

The Cube redefined

The cube as a form seems limited enough: put something inside it, paint each side of it and tadah! it’s a work of art. But in Cube at the Tall Gallery of Finale Art File (Pasong Tamo, Makati City) curated by Nilo Ilarde, the cube is revealed in all its possibilities, my only complaint is that there was too much.

Fill it up, or paint it on!

In Cube filling up the cube didn’t mean being uncreative. One only has to look at Juan Alcazaren’s “Hampering My Efforts” to see this to be true, as it always is for his body of work. This is true too of Ed Bolanes’ “Retirement” which seemed like an easy decision to fill in a transparent cube with remnants of a career as dentist. But this was also about the compartments within the cube, filled exactly with machines, teeth molds, painkillers, a random plastic glass maybe. In the end it was impossible to actually see everything that was there, the layers of glass compartments rendering retirement to be about layers of a life lived in loyalty to a career.

Raul Rodriguez’s “Die Inside” and “No Formaldehyde for Miro” were standard cubes with rattan frames, the former in black and the latter in gold. “Die Inside” is a cube with another cube inside it, atop charcoal, with masking and electric tape, a seeming paean to death within. “No Formaldehyde for Miro” seems like an ideal space to live, where the inside of the cube is alive with color and wonderment.  Hanna Pettyjohn’s “DFW, In Transit” meanwhile is a non-descript standard-sized delivery crate, the inside of which reveals what looks like a papier-mâché head of a middle-aged man, wide-eyes, slightly frowning, pursed lips. That this is familiar and normal to us, can only keep it painful.

Painting on and attaching things to the cube was also mostly unconventional here. Annie Cabigting’s “Paper Weight” is a 50 x 50 x 50 hunk of a cube that’s covered with shredded paper, an environmentalist up-yours to all us paper wasters.  Louie Cordero’s “No Piucha” is a happy box of a cartoon monster, his arm extending from the base of the light blue cube, with a finger pointing to nowhere.  MM Yu’s “Asleep” meanwhile was a wonderfully quiet cube, with a marble print of interspersed reds and blues and greens, almost featherlike, as calm as sleep.

Tearing the cube apart

More than the cubes filled with things, what’s here are cubes that are torn apart, not literally of course, but in terms of playing around with the idea of it. Kiri Dalena’s “White Cube” for example is made up of neon tubes that form the structure of the cube but allow its sides to be imagined through the darkness that the light creates. Nikki Luna’s “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me” also uses orange neon to create a cube, though this one was made to look like a house with a root. Against one side of the cube in white neon is written: “You lock the door and throw away the key”, which renders the cube as a possible space of love and its contingent abandonments.

Eng Chan’s four cubes are functional lamps made distinct from each by its materials: a bathroom drain here, a floor drain there, ice trays for another.  What is interesting about this work is that its existence is only completed when the lamp is turned on, and individual shadows are cast against the wall. This might also be the value of the Pete Jimenez’s two works, “Sketches” and “4 x 4”, both in dark heavy steel and both highlighting structure more than anything else. The former is a five-piece set of small cube structures with no sides, while the latter is a pair of solid steel cubes against each side of which are four holes. For these two works the weight of the material is all important, and the effect of that seems to be the point.

Which is what Pablo Biglang-Awa’s “S” can take pride in, too. Here is a cube with top and one side cut off, revealing what is a letter S covered in red candle wax that spills out and spreads randomly on the cube floor. That it is this image that’s disconcerting which doesn’t have a big reveal ironically renders it more surprising, if not affecting a little more discomfort than most.

Ah, but who else can tear a cube apart like Roberto Chabet? “Box” is a medium density board torn open to form a flat cross on the floor of the gallery. Painted in red, blue, yellow, black and white, it was an interesting centerpiece to a room filled with cubes, seeing as it was anything but. In light of this huge piece, it was difficult to appreciate Patty Eustaquio’s and Maria Taniguchi’s “Odyssey”, 12 photographic swatches flat on the floor, the imagination of two cubes too much of a stretch, really.

The unconventional and successful cube

Which is to say that this exhibit is filled with unconventional structures and objects that are cube-like but would generally not be seen as such, i.e., a metal safe or a TV set, even a freezer. The latter is Felix Bacolor’s “Almost Blue”, a wonderful imagination of the possibility of creating a perfect cube of blue ice. There was too Aba Dalena’s “Excubisinist Cat (Terra Cruda)” a sculpture in unfired clay of a cat wearing a cube, and playing with it on its tail and nose. Mawen Ong’s “Boxed” is a huge red cube that’s actually made up of columns of shoeboxes. It is a presence and nothing else.

The better cubes that shined in this exhibit were surprisingly smaller works. Jucar Raquepo’s seven small cubes an interesting rendering of the small toy cube and all its possibilities of being filled in, collaged on, rendered unfamiliar and almost losing its shape drowning in mixed media. Raquepo’s “Cube Construction” though was to die for, a cube created through plastic toy parts, a toy cube of toys, the wonder of toys times two, the one thing I wish I could afford to buy.

And then there was Soler Santos’ “Untitled” which was 20 wooden light boxes of the same size, all reflecting brightly images of tinier pieces of cubes in wood, some seemingly excess of a bigger project, others random cube objects of the same size, all being exhibited in these cubes. Now that is a meta-cube if there ever was one, an artwork meta-critiquing itself as it does the rest of the cubes that surrounds it.

Only Lara de los Reyes’ “Selected Works” could beat that, as it doesn’t quite paint a cube or fill it in, as it does create one using oil paint scraps. With a title like that, it also ended up questioning our notion of selected works in particular and exhibits in general. So really, cubes never looked this good.

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.

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…)

via thepoc.net’s Metakritiko section.

I don’t know Angelo Suarez, Gelo, personally, but I appreciate his (virtual) presence in the way that I tend to love every other person who has the gall/temerity/balls man/woman/gay to speak his mind even when it’s unpopular. The thing is, there was nothing unpopular about Gelo’s review of Pablo Gallery’s Chabet, Tan, Ilarde exhibit.In fact, knowing the kind of consciousness Gelo brings to art, this was a pretty good review – good, being, he liked the exhibit – like, being, he didn’t dismiss the exhibit – didn’t dismiss, being, he actually wrote about it.

Which in these shores is something we should be thankful for, right? Here, where the conversations on art – any art – are praised when they are praise releases, where the critical bent is, i.e., the good review that speaks of the bad in art, is always deemed unproductive and useless. The goal kasi is to sell art.

This goal is what Gelo hits at with http://thepoc.net/metakritiko/metakritiko-features/4794-conceptualism-fellatio-a-the-admission-of-the-futility-of-resistance-as-a-form-of-resistance.html Conceptualism,fellatio, and the admission of futility of resistance as a form of resistance. On that level, the question for the spectator should become: do I agree with Gelo? My answer, as a spectator, is no. I agree with Antares, from whom the more intelligent comments on the Gelo’s article came (and who should really be writing art reviews, please please?). In light of capital, resistance isn’t necessarily futile, and to insiston futility is to place one’s critique very clearly on the side of capital and its contingent oppressions. Parang, ay walang nang resistance, so ‘wag na lang?

But what has become more obvious in the aftermath of Gelo’s article is that this isn’t even the question that’s being asked, and there is a refusal to even begin a discussion on the crucial things about contemporary Philippine art that Gelo raises.

the rest here!