By Samito Jalbuena
ART fairs are a chopsuey of sorts, a pastiche. At the recently concluded ManilART 2015, visitors were treated to another kind of mixed dish that was uniquely Filipino, while others struggled to criticize the fair as somewhat lackluster in the search for better and more critical programming.
Indeed, everyone’s an art critic, or—in this case—an art-fair critic. But ManilART, touted by proponents to be “the largest and most comprehensive visual-arts fair in the Philippines,” with more than 30 art galleries, including participants from Malaysia, Singapore and France, has made its seventh iteration its most successful year so far, according to its organizers who point to its gallery list as unimpeachable evidence that ManilART is more attuned than ever to represent the state of Philippine art as we know it. Plus, the seventh edition was highlighted by foreign galleries as exhibitors, another sign of breaking success. The art fair, again presented and supported by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the Bonafide Art Galleries Organization (BAGO), was indeed more effusive and livelier than ever, as it also strode to provide a temporary, yet brilliant, shrine to the victory that was the Philippines’s historic return to the Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition after a 51-year absence.
Before its participation in the Venice Biennale this year, the Philippines had its first and last participation in the 32nd edition of La Biennale in 1964. While a ManilART exhibit revisited the country’s 1964 entry, the Seventh ManilART iteration also gave visitors a clue to the success of the 2015 Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, including the hidden efforts that contributed to this historic return spearheaded by the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Office of Senator Loren Legarda, and the NCCA. Representing the country at the 56th Venice Biennale was curator Dr. Patrick Flores, filmmaker Mariano Montelibano III and artist Jose Tence Ruiz. Indeed, if it wasn’t for this genius bit of programming, ManilART 2015 would have been a bit lackluster.
But to say that without judgment would be to the detriment of other efforts that have made ManilART quite an eye-opening success. There were more than a few satellite exhibits that sought to redefine art making and art thinking for all concerned.
Perhaps foremost among these was Two Titans: Aguilar Alcuaz & Castrillo, a presentation by Galleria Nicolas that pitted the technique of two giants of Philippine art, or rather the latter—namely Castrillo’s reaction to the departed National Artist Federico Aguilar Alcuaz. While Alcuaz’s oeuvre has already been set in stone, Castrillo’s latest effort plumbed the representational and abstract qualities of the former to produce a sort of conceptual hybrid between the two in the form of Castrillo’s latest sculpture. The exhibit was illuminating for it also gave breadth to the distinction that modernism is not only a historical evolution from past to present, but a mixture of repetition and pattern, and of a recognizable spirit that unites its adherents under its fold.
Meanwhile, another back-to-back art exhibit presented the works of glass sculptor Ramon Orlina against the backdrop of canvasses by Clarence Chun. While Orlina is perhaps known by everyone this side of the art world, Chun is a younger entity, a Filipino-American who was named Artist of Hawaii in 2013 and a recipient of the prestigious John Young Foundation Award. In pitting old and young together, Gallery Big sought to create an alternative space for reverie over the known and the unknown.
While Orlina’s classic modernism intends to portray the transcendence of form within and through the boundaries of his glassy and totemic medium, Chun’s images are often conflicting multiples of identity and anti-identity, which may be said to be apropos for the Philippine diaspora, Chun being a balikbayan and point of departure floating amid American, Chinese and Filipino normatives.
The engagement was a clash of virtues, as well as a union of focal points in the stride for art not merely as a product of singular geniuses, but as a mirror of the larger social spheres that produce artists.
Also not to be relegated to the dustbin of forgetfulness was Galerie Francesca’s presentation of the most recent works of Roel Obemio, an artist made popular by his interpretative pastiches of famous artistic works using the volume-exaggerating technique of Columbian artist Fernando Botero. Homage 2 struck many viewers as perhaps one of the most appealing efforts to come out of ManilART 2015. This was due to a pervailing postmodern insouciance that art can be anything or nothing, even the hybridization of the technique of a South American with classic images from the Renaissance onward, within the frame of a contemporary Filipino artist’s work. Does art have to be too logical or stern? Indeed, in the work of Obemio, it can be all these, including a pun on being and disjointedness, while still remaining cute and whimsical to the core.
All in all, ManilART 2015 saw all these and more instances of the probabilities of artistic creation in the short period of four days starting October 8 at the SM Aura Convention Center in Taguig City. If you were present to see the fireworks, would you say the art fair had lived up to its theme of “Raising the Filipino Colors on the World Stage”?