Eleven fingers road

There are stars in the monsoon sky, and the eleven fingers road points to Galerie Astra at LRI Design building along Reposo, just across the Alliance Française French cultural center. Eleven artists are featured in a group show titled ‘Sampu’t Isang Daliri,’ curated by Gus Albor, himself no mean artist.

Let it be said that the title reminded of an older sister’s classmate in elementary school, whose name was Diwata. She had 11 fingers, which we thought was cute until we learned that her younger brother had nine fingers, so that we learned at an early age the subtle rules of the universe — nothing is given that can’t be taken away, always the yin and yang of it.

That digression aside, Reposo has its fair share of diwatas with “Sampu’t Isang Daliri,” which we had been advised by one of the 11 abstract painters Yob Achacruz, that it originally should have been 10, but conceptual artist Alan Rivera was selected to join nearly at the last minute, to complete the 10 plus one, so that numerologists and fortune tellers cannot help but mull on the ramifications of the number eleven, which literally does the already well-rounded number 10 one better.

Achacruz last year had his one-man show at the Bar@1951, and his pair of works that are his contribution to the group exhibit are a significant departure from “Wasted,” though in a way both “Yin Yang” and “Recycled Dream” may perhaps be considered as footnotes to being wasted.

“It’s a long process,” Yob says on the act of putting out work, of painting and repainting over, letting canvases gleam and blur until some subconscious tic comes rising to the surface. The predominantly blue Recycled is to the left of entrance to the gallery, where on opening night a guitar player or two are strumming and singing Beatles songs, while Albor is at the side holding a flute.

Slightly off center is the Rivera installation sculpture consisting of a found page of hardened calligraphy, beside a man’s head with what appears to be a turd on top. Might this be a statement on the state of casual art criticism, even as the gallery goers pass by the work after taking a curious glimpse at the visage, what profound thoughts could be brewing in that half-open glass case?

Across from Yob’s recycled and at angle to the turd man is the work of printmaker Pandy Aviado, a series of prints or studies of larger works earlier seen some moons ago at Art Informal in Mandaluyong, but here we can appreciate the sandboxes with outlines of ships for all their raw intimacy, as if we can already hear the sound of graphite on paper. How ink flows like blood off the nib.

Beside Aviado is a series of exercises in pen and ink by Cesare Syjuco, as usual understated and sublime in their irony if not self-depreciation. Directly across from these small-scale drawings on the opposite panel is one of the artist’s fluorescent boxes, how there are no ants in Antwerp, which again we recall having seen before in his solo show in Galeria Duemila. It would hardly be a Syjuco input if there wasn’t a light box, which concept the artist nurses like a fetish.

Continuing at the right panel nearing center are a couple of relatively large-scale works by the supremo Junyee, again touches away from his grand outdoor installations on CCP grounds of 1) innumerable stumps of trees and 2) improvised elesis playing tag with the wind. But even confined within the four corners of a conventional canvas, Junyee’s painting has the innate ability to play tricks with space, and the indigenous here is not merely for novelty but rather subtle apolitical statement.

Beside Junyee are the more colorful, angular paintings of Roy Veneracion, which raise abstraction almost to the level of post-cubism. Across Veneracion this time on the left panel are somewhat huge works of Hermisanto, “Computerice,” which aptly enough combine computer graphics with the un-husked harvest shaped into grains of wonder.

There too are the works of Joey Ibay and Raul Lebajo among other participants to this rare group show, which at the far end has Achacruz’s Yin yang in red, and may have the critic stumped looking for a common theme or denominator. They are all adept drawers no doubt, which make them part old school, yet they don’t shut the door to modern or even postmodern concept, open to a tweet as good as a nod or a wink.

Certainly it is not farfetched to think that there’s more where this came from, though let’s hear it for the proper use of restraint in art. “Sampu’t Isang Daliri” may be the painter’s oceans 11, counting the muses on the fingers of one named Diwata.