Thursday is the day of choice of Art Informal to open a new show or exhibit, if for no other reason than that there’s minimal competition on that day for events like this, and it is close enough to the weekend to entice art aficionados and assorted culture vultures who may want to check out the latest works in the gallery located on Connecticut Street, a short stroll away from Ortigas corner.
For the month of February AI has the works of the conjugal sculptors Noell El Farol and Mervy Pueblo, in a show entitled “Arteries + Excavations.”
El Farol, Pasig-born archeologist and installation sculptor working with glass, steel and other found objects unearthed from excavation sites, employs such concepts as carbon dating as well fabric-like pieces with miniature embossments enclosed in a frame, plus some engravings on a glass book and a couple of death masks from the same material.
What at first glance seems like a wooden boat reveals itself at a flick of a finger to be composite steel, the rust-colored matter returning back a muffled sound as if from the hull of a ship.
El Farol, whose very name evokes yuletide memories and sounds like a character in a Latin-American spy novel, is rather like a minimalist when exploring things in the dirt, and yet is able to come up with surprising little universes of the mind.
El Farol has done the rounds of the region, attending sculptors’ fora in Southeast Asia, including one in Vietnam late last year. His works are a breath of fresh air for the local scene, the Indiana Jones of contemporary Philippine art.
Pueblo’s stone sculpture impresses at the get-go with its mass and lyric deviations of marble, at least one of the works suggesting the shape left by the constant splashing of water. Near the gallery entrance is “Siren,” a seeming inflatable toy that is like a huge comb conveying the vital statistics of a mermaid.
Less fanciful but no less stirring is the slate-like mass of stone with sand pebbles as its base near the sliding glass doors leading to the outdoor porch, the almost perfect green of its contours bringing memories of cliffs jutting on foreign shores.
There’s at least one collaboration of this recent coupling, the subject having to do with intertwined snakes embedded in concrete sculpture, an unconscious recreation of the Medusa tale, though this in no way is shaped like a head, rather a block of immovable mass with a self-contained slithering.
Mervy, whose name is a combination of her parent’s first names, usually orders the marble by phone and on which she chisels and carves away until reaching the finished product, an emblem or totem leaving a distinct mark in space.
Gallery owner Tina Fernandez, who has turned a childhood home into Art Informal, says the first quarter of this year would be devoted to sculpture.
Some kilometers away in Cubao, at the corner of New York Street and Sgt. Catolos, another elusive romance is gearing up on the walls and interiors of the Britania Art Projects gallery with “Bulan,” paintings by Katti Sta. Ana and terra cotta sculptures by Roberto Acosta.
More rooted on earth and situated in the here and now, “Bulan” (which translates literally to moon) is less cerebral but by no means pedestrian, as both hoi polloi and ivory tower veteran may find something in the exhibit that delights.
“Beatles” is not so much nostalgic as heartwarming, the couple in the painting singing along to a lone guitar and songbook — why, this is like John and Yoko transposed into 21st-century Pinoy homebodies.
“Si Berto at si Kaka” reproduces the inseparable locket with pictures of great loves, but this with a wry sense of humor on the part of the woman’s hairdo.
There’s a painting where the man seems to be courting the woman old school style, but not that traditional really because the biker as suitor is on the outdoor steps while the ladylove is smiling from the window. Sta. Ana’s work reminds one of the tarot oil paintings of Brenda Fajardo in its generous use of color, and recall, too the unassuming child-like drawings of Kai Hegelman in its innocence.
Green consciousness comes to the surface in Sta. Ana’s “Sa Ikauunlad ng Bayan Bisikleta ang Kailangan,” a mixed media assemblage installation piece complete with bicycle wheels, softdrink crowns, and an ample collection of dried leaves which could very well have been recruited from the falling leaves outside the gallery.
In “Langit ng Eddet” a couple are lying under the sheltering sky like a pair of Russian dolls, only what’s in them is not more dolls but could be the very sky itself.
Quite a novelty and an undercurrent of a story, too, are the terra cotta sculptures of Acosta, harking back to the earth of memory, including the soil and clay in Mexico where he spent some time as artist in residence. It is then no accident that the figures can be considered as indirect tribute to the Sto. Niño and other religious figures, in a kind of reshaping of our Catholic subconscious.
While the work may find the viewer hard-pressed to resist putting a garland of sampaguita around the different figurines’ necks, the impulse is not unfounded and perhaps even indigenous, as our ancestors held in similar high esteem the bulol.
“From people to couple” is a phrase culled from the exhibit liner notes as read aloud by one amused biker at show’s opening, and we can only glance up at the moon whether or not in penumbral eclipse, and wonder if it’s the same moon that has inspired these artists to pare down their work from the communal to the personal, and in so doing touch base with the residual mother lode.