About Face is more than about face. While at a glance, the works in exhibition are images of faces – some in fact are of celebrated artists, they are paintings to begin with. Judging from the way the works are installed in the gallery, the exhibit echoes the candid observation of Aaron Shikler (known for his extremely realistic likenesses in late 20th century portraiture) when he once said "a portrait is first and foremost a painting. The subject is secondary."
The function of portraiture, of course, finds solid grounding in history. The portrait from earliest times has been considered a conduit to immortality. Magical properties have been ascribed to the portrait: Either as "substitution for a deceased individual’s living presence or theft of the soul of the living subject" among the Egyptians, or "symbolization of the majesty or authority of the subject" during the Renaissance.
Declining in popularity during the later 20th century, portraiture sparked a revival in the 1970s, when artists combined realism and abstraction in paintings to convey both likeness and psychological insights of the sitter.
Twenty years later, it underwent a facelift when aside from highlighting the individuality and physicality of human identity, the art form became informed with issues on multiculturalism and the mass media. Chuck Close stands tall as an icon of this genre.
Contemporary artists remain challenged by the art of portraiture. They continue to device fresh approaches to the art form. One portrait artist, Paul Newton, once asked: "How do you keep variety in your work? You are fundamentally dealing with a human being who looks like every other human – that is, two eyes, a nose, a mouth. How do you keep from repeating yourself?" And indeed, what else can an artist do with portraits?
About Face proffers some new insights to these questions.
About Face, therefore, is not the usual exhibition of portraits. The works in the collection harness the human face as a take off point in crafting other images. The artist, Winner Jumalon, born to a family of artists in Zamboanga, banks on the world of artists as a rich source for this artistic foray. He scanned the Manila art scene with his digital camera and took pictures of artists in numerous art happenings and exhibition openings.
Most of the personas shown here are personally known to Jumalon, the few who are not are related to the young artist simply because they are artists. The cohesion ends there.
Jumalon is no George Baselitz in this case. Baselitz, it will be remembered, painted German artists he admired, painting their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits, too.
The artistic impetus for this exhibition purely derives from Jumalon’s fascination with faces. He shares this proclivity with David Hockney who once noted, "Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people – the point where we go inside them – is the face. It tells all."
The created painted faces from digital prints then become a convenient platform for Jumalon to pursue his own creative agenda. He paints over them, adds new materials to them, punctures holes or cuts incisions on certain areas of the canvas, and at some instances, even defaces the images.
The result is an amalgam of colors, shapes, textures, and tonalities, which is what painting is all about. Through this debut show, Jumalon paves his winning way to paint.
On another level, Jumalon essentializes the faces by focusing on their ovoid shape. This is what Pablo Picasso referred to as the egg.
What was it that Picasso said? "When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form… one inevitably ends up with an egg."
Truly, egg is an embryonic form. And artists should always be reminded of its significance. When an egg is warmed well, new ideas and techniques are hatched, challenging levels of creativity, and throwing complacency and formulaic existence into the wind.
The exhibit offers something more than meets the eye. The word "exit" can be read in the eyes of the images captured. In this sense, Jumalon refurbishes the word "exit" with fresh artistic vistas.
Jumalon foregrounds a metaphor. He likens portraiture to some kind of a prison. Artists should not be constrained by the customary aspect of portraiture as the art of representing the physical or psychological likeness of a real or imaginary individual via the principal media of painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography.
For Jumalon, portraits are an exhaustible venue to nourish one’s art. Like R.B. Kitaj, he does not "listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done."