Pinoy visual art as spectacle

One lovely development happening in our country is the apparent explosion of talent, nay, genius, in the visual and musical arts. Our choirs keep topping the best of the world; our singers amateur and professional keep gaining notice, plaudits and contracts. Our filmmakers, led by the indie-inclined likes of Brillante Mendoza and Raymond Red, among others, keep proving time and again how arrestingly cinematic are our concerns, themes, and skills.

But it is in the fast-evolving genre of the visual arts where we excel almost to a man. That is — if I may serialize a litany of idiomatic expressions — everybody and his brother seems to be coming out of the woodwork to push the envelope in a terrific naissance of often spectacular work.

Relatively unknown young artists are jostling for attention and dollars in foreign auctions. The list is growing endless — of how this or that artist is hot on the heels of Bencab in terms of adding to our wealth of artistic patrimony as well as contributing to the national coffers by way of the BIR.

 Manuel Ocampo, Marcel Antonio, Ronald Ventura, Poklong Anading, Kawayan de Guia, Liv Vinluan easily come to mind. Andres Barrioquinto and Nona Garcia, apart from Malang’s redoubtable heirs, lord it over at West Gallery with fine, exciting work. Each week we get sundry invites to show openings at Whitespace, SilverLens (for photography) and its sister gallery Slab, and a host of other venues where Pinoy artists of all conceptual stripes and palpable solids display this seemingly genetic ability to stun viewers and draw them in to an appreciation of the creative process, that is, if they still don’t have the wherewithal for a condo unit for the beginnings of an art collection.

I don’t know if it may have something to do with an evident construction boom, but our painters, sculptors, graphic artists, photographers and multi-media artists never had it so good. To think that P-Noy still has to say something, anything, about our arts and culture.

Well, if I had his ear I’d tell him to give a couple of special friends of mine primary and primal attention. Currently on show are two exhibitions that may be radically different, but share in the bounty of what it is to be creatively Pinoy.

Since it opened on July 22 at the SM Megamall’s Art Center, Igan D’Bayan’s “Dead Beliefs and Black Vomits” may have caused parents to quickly pull out their kids from the exhibit for fear of having to negotiate with a therapist. But for undismayed adults whose mindsets are a polar stretch from those of our garden-variety Catholic bishops, meaning to say they will not close their hearts to anything that might even be classified as bizarre, then the display is an eye-opener.

We who have followed Igan’s career may have known what to expect: phantasmagoric images that aren’t usually considered appropriate for conventional living rooms or office lobbies. But this latest exhibit takes it to a grander plane, with large works that prove mesmeric individually and collectively.

No wonder it’s a sell-out. Collectors are on to Igan, who has undoubtedly staked a métier all to himself: a dark, mock-mythopoeic-Gothic realm where human figures have bared ribcages and occasional beastly heads, skulls showing, tendrils sprouting from noses, eyes that are void sockets, private parts rendered in deconstructed exposure.

Some figures are also draped in what looks to be medieval capes, and always there’s a narrative to be plumbed from such dark depths. Why, even a backstory, as visual allusions suggest homage to possible influences, or credit archetypal imagery with the boon of an enhanced take. 

Thus do we kowtow to at least two large canvases eerily lampooning the iconic “American Gothic.” The simpler one has the male figure still with the trident of a pitchfork, but his head is of an unidentifiable creature with a visible ribcage that leads down to his member. He (or it) is partnered with a normal-looking lady in a red blouse, bearing what looks like a mutant rabbit on her alabaster arm. Igan’s devils and daemons are in the details: the man’s white fist clutches at something, while an A-frame structure looms in the background, a house or a chapel with a barely recognizable crucifix for a portal.

The show’s signature piece may be the diptych with the same poses, this time with Marcos in transparent barong, x-rayed to his ribcage, standing between two short canine bodyguards or cohorts, while his partner is in terno’t saya but whose head is that of a full-mane horse. She (or it) clutches a rosary whose crucifix dangles tantalizingly close to an exposed, strangely disfigured pudenda. 

All the pieces in the exhibit bear scrutiny for their confrontational, in-your-face explosions of menace. A figure wearing purple jock briefs is crucified upside down. Riding a magnificent stallion is a caped, bewigged lady in a red bra, sheen stockings and high heels, carrying a pennant pole that might have impaled a male dog-creature or its severed head. Shafts of light emanate from the chest of a rocker figure, while frontal nudity frames a female figure with an animal head. Then there’s the portrait of a “Bekka Blackheart” which we understand to be expressive of particularized personal angst, perhaps as a cri de coeur.

On a side wall is a series of modest canvases, a concession to our heritage of smallness, showcasing a semiotics of geometric codes with attendant playful figures — but they’re Igan’s figures, thus not cuddly but stark in their acrobatics. And as a centerpiece, a modular assemblage hangs from the ceiling, bearing what look like spiders or crabs, or again some mutation of an army of stalking legs but with mini-skulls adorning the carapaces. 

C’est mordantly magnifique, I daresay, and warn further that Igan D’Bayan is by leaps and bounds already a supremacist as artist, wielding a full armory of strange, unique bells and whistles that buzz like vuvuzelas from a cauldron of mythic phantasmagoria. 

This splendorous display organized by The Crucible Gallery is on until August 3. Spice up your nightmares with a stalking venture. This is high art with the full flavor of Pinoy Guignol.

Over at Galleria Duemila on Loring St. in Pasay (off Park Avenue), catch another show, of a diametric extreme: all light and antic wit, and one that marries text with visuals in the featured artist’s own pioneering way.

“The Ancestry of the Stone: His New Literary Hybrids” opened on July 23 (till August 28), presenting multi-award-winning painter, poet and critic Cesare A.X. Syjuco’s recent works: a total of 20 brand-new pieces that are playful forays into the literary and the visual.

Composing the delightful spectacle are four text/object composites in vitrines, two neon installations, 13 backlit text/image composites on acrylic panels, and a video projection with the hypertext: “I WOULD / IF I COULD / BUT I CAN’T / SO I WON’T.” Bonuses consist of the landmark pieces “Perfectio(n)” (of white neon, and which was shown initially at the CCP Gallery in 2004, and “Here.” which was presented in both Mag:net and BluRoom in 2008. 

The latter is particularly appealing, as it’s one work by Syjuco that includes a token of a local context. Vertically book-ending twin rows of white neons are three sets of text: “There are more Nazis Here today than in all of Berlin. — Hermann Goering; There are more Haagen Dazs outlets Here today than in the whole of Central Africa. — Bono; I like it Here. I might never leave. —Jose Ma. Sison”

To me it all seems to say: Take that, pinkos. But then with Cesare, one never knows exactly what borders can contain the artist’s cutting-edge cheek cum coruscating chutzpah that somehow wind up as non-violative if outrÈ humor. Why, even his flaming red neon installation declaring that “God speaks to Cesare” is outright deniable. 

The vitrines should make it to a special museum for the unbearable lightness of being. One titled “Space Water” showcases a dead bonsai. “A Simple Case of Arm Robbery” has a Nazarene figure shorn of arms and cross. “Generation of the Lie” exhibits ‘Magellan’s Teapot’ while “Greek to Me” has ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ engraved on stone.

Even the gallery bathroom isn’t spared the ludic touch, with a translucent panel bearing the imprint of a terrified or terrifying female figure standing on the edge of the bathtub. This homage to “Psycho” is titled “derDuschraum.”

A neon sign reads as “AVANTI” in reverse, while “PERFECTIO(N) has its last letter busted in more ways than one.

It is this kind of light-as-a-feather, mock-nihilistic environment that encourages performances such as were rendered conspiratorially on opening day — by the artist’s daughter Maxine, Danny Sillada, JP Hernandez, Lirio Salvador and Mitch Garcia of Elemento, and poets RayVi Sunico, Jimmy Abad, and Vim Nadera. The last outdid even himself, delivering a classic aria that will forever operatically introduce “Ce-sa-re, Ce-sa-re Sy-ju-co” — to the tune of “Besame Mucho.”

Indeed, with so much of the Philippine visual art scene may we be so besotted.