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Galleria
Duemila has always impressed me with its offering of
artists shown in their widest context. The massive
dimension of exhibits in the gallery is not necessarily
in terms of huge canvases, though the gallery has had
such exhibits in the past, but in the curatorship, which
takes the artist outside the frame and into the social
world where art really matters as commentator.
So much
of the power of the gallery’s products is helped along
also by artists whose works ache to be part of the
worlds around them. There are many examples, but let me
talk of those I have reviewed. There was Lina Ciani’s
beautiful images born out of the artist’s terrifying
engagement with the natural calamities that beset her
hometown. There were the daring excursions of Romina
Diaz and Ann Wizer, which literally started in art
exercises showing boxes but incorporating later the
works of girls in the neighborhood who technically were
not artists in the strict sense of the word. That was
one intrepid model for thinking out of the box, a
character that marks all great arts.
FELIPINAS I,
Roberto M.A.
Robles, acrylic on canvas, 60.05"x104.58", 2008
Now,
there is this succession of three artists, which saw
their exhibits all concluding in the month of July.
There
was the joint exhibit of two artists seemingly disparate
but connected in their quest to image and understand the
social order of things. Leonardo Aguinaldo regales us
with works with colors that seem to burst all over. He
exhibited under the theme of Connectivity. The other
artist is Kidlat de Guia, pedigreed and, like the
father, inventive and willing to work out of the
technology of photography. His works came under the
heading White Elephants.
Put
together, the two artists complement each other as they
battle sensibility for sensibility the society they find
themselves working off and with. In the case of de Guia,
his windows gave him the opportunity to see abandoned
40-story high-rises. The derelicts become studies in
structural stasis and the social dynamics of
underdevelopment. Mammoth in proportion, the buildings
in the works of de Guia’s appear to be dead, but in the
coloration the artist achieved for the skies, the
buildings begin to have a life—and death—of their own.
The
artist then transforms the images into concrete light
boxes, thus completing his feeling that these symbols of
waste and false progress will always be part of our view
of the world, as they have been the horizon in his room
with the good/bad view.
Connecti vit y,
Leonardo
Aguinaldo, 2008, UKIR (Hand Colored carved rubber),
48"x78"
Kidlat
de Guia pursues his art in the field of filmmaking,
which gives this much awarded artist all the palette and
possibilities.
Claude
Monet said color was his daylong obsession, joy and
torment. You sense this feeling when viewing Leonardo
Aguinaldo’s works, which are done on large-scale
rubbers, its surface cut and detailed and colored and in
search of connections.
The
pleasant colors teasing the garish are deceptive. The
subject matter of Aguinaldo, like those of de Guia’s, is
not about the societal hunky-dory and niceties. They are
about this country, warts and all, but presented through
the favorite tools of the West: iconography, mapping and
schematic diagramming ad heraldry. Take his maze-like
Connectivity. It is designed like a coat of arms but
subverts the common symbols of the regular coat of arms.
At the center is what looks like a human anatomy grossly
wrong. The reproductive system mixes up the female and
the male and where the urethra ends, there is a mouth,
wide open and showing a palate holding a white thing
labeled “Earth.” At the upper right-hand portion, a
drawing of a brain is about to be eaten by a
piranha-looking fish. Animals are all over this “bad”
heraldry: a red crow has bitten a satellite; a docile
carabao is on the verge of masticating the end portion
of a grass that is really an electric wiring with a plug
on the lower left; at the right-hand lower portion is
the great crocodile about to gobble all the human
elements of this universe not gone awry but potentially
on the brink of destruction through a system it has
created.
Work
after work, Aguinaldo is Hieronymous Bosch transplanted
into the Third World, with Bosch’s triptych Garden of
Earthly Delights transformed into a manifesto of
alternative ideologies.
Among
the many awards he has received, Aguinaldo was the
recipient of the grand prize in the Asean Art Award
under the auspices of the Philip Morris Asia-Pacific in
Bangkok, Thailand. Also, he was honored with the
Thirteen Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the
Philippines.
The
third artist ventures into the realm of the Zen.
Recognizing, perhaps, that the term being overused can
obfuscate rather than articulate, Roberto M.A. Robles
opts to use the Chinese reading of the character “Chán.”
In the notes about the exhibit Felipinas: The Chan
Rooster’s Threshold, ascribed to Gina Fairley, many
other elements come to the fore: the rooster described
as a fowl that scratches the ground, reflecting the
artist’s search for his roots through artifacts dug in
his native Batangas; the haiku-like flash of intuition
apparent in the paintings and sculptures; and that place
called Felipenas, the artist’s
reconstruction/deconstruction of the native land whose
name is stuck to a colonial labeling.
By
hitching his art to Zen, will Robles attain satori
or enlightenment? Will his viewers have the same
experience? Even as Zen is a way that privileges the
nothing to something, its contribution to the art is not
in the fleeting but more in the achievement of the
material reflection of that which corresponds to the
ephemeral. We grasp the ineffable because some artists
have the mind to capture the blank or argue for the
mu or that “which has not.”
What,
then, can the artist do with his search for roots if he
is using Zen? What this Japan-trained artist (he was
schooled in the University of Tsukuba in Japan) does
really is to share with us his view of a country, this
Felipenas, with a past and a present all coming
in the form of a koan, a narrative for
meditation.
In all
of his series titled Felipinas, the burden of
interpretation and understanding proceeds from the
paintings and ends with the viewers, the latter to
confront the aesthetics of shibui, the Japanese
aesthetics of the subtle and the simple and the
effacing.
For
Robles, memories of this country can come through fields
of browns and greens, with dashes that point to grounds
that swell with shadows and points of orientation.
Otherwise, the landscape yields no clues about who we
are and where we are heading. The Zen story maybe can
help: We should let go of the cliff, die completely, and
then come back to life and then be not deceived anymore.
As in post-colonial existence, where nationhood and
ethnicities are ever fluid and moving.
Galleria
Duemila is at 210 Loring Street, Pasay City. Rock
Drilon’s recent works are part of the ongoing exhibition
in the gallery. |
