The super gathering

The following serves as the Notes for a unique art exhibition, which starts with a special invitational preview two days from now, then becomes accessible to the public in the next few days, from Oct. 16 to 19.

It’s curated by my young FB friend Gromyko Semper, whom I have yet to meet in person. Last Christmas he got wind of my bargain acquisition of three ostrich eggs from a bazaar. He offered to illustrate one of them. I sent him a couple. He gets to keep one, paints the other for me. He’s done that. At the special art show preview on Wednesday, I see Myko and my painted ostrich egg for the first time.

All that aside, here now are my Notes that provide a backgrounder on the international surrealist show Myko organized, the first ever mounted in our art-blessed metropolis. 

*  *  *

From the Gallerie Pierre in Paris where “La Peinture Surrealiste,” the very first exhibition of Surrealism as visual arts, was held in 1925, all the wanton way to the SMX Convention Center in Taguig, Metro Manila, where an ambitiously curated art show, “Endangered Visions,” becomes part of the Manila Art Fair in October 2014, it’ll be a surreptitious span of nearly 90 years.

Roughly a century it has been, and then some, since Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word that would turn up to become a surrogate for reality in creativity, in fact even surpass what was the established norm at the time.

“Surrealist” entered the world’s vibrant vocabulary in the preface to the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. The Breasts of Tiresias was subsequently adapted into an opera by Francis Poulenc.

Fitting, isn’t it? Got milk?

Yes, Myko’s got it. For which, Bravo and Mabuhay!, Gromyko Semper. Suck and suckle we all will, with fidelity forever.

Now having flowed their way into Third-World turf (if of First-Class art), the human kindnesses the planet over may be said to have been juxtaposed, super-imposed, on the cream of reality.

Give or take some moments adding up to memory’s persistence (as in melting clocks and watches), it’s been roughly a hundred years of over-the-top application of what has evolved as universal art.

Ringleader Andre Breton’s manifesto with its explicit claim to a revolutionary movement was also preceded by Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poète)” in 1914: A century exact! The figure in his painting turns away from the viewer. Juxtaposed are a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief. It is said to defy “conventional explanation.”

Di Chirico also wrote a novel, Hebdomeros, as a series of dreamscapes with bizarre employment of punctuation, syntax and grammar. His set designs for ballet later influenced Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte.

First it was practice, pioneering, revolutionary. Then it was theory, giving formal voice to whimsical notion sprung from the restless and the brave — the ABC’s of exploration as led by A.B. or founder Andre Breton — thence attempting to become a philosophy of life and learning and creative articulation.

The first expression was, of course, with words, thus literature. The visual arts were echa-pwera’d, considered out of the box initially, until in that genre, too, did surrealism take hold, first for painting, followed theater, music, film.

Only fitting as well was Breton’s earlier mentorship program with Sigmund Freud, thus free association, dream analysis and the courage to mine the unconscious for the liberation of imagination.

Surprise! Or was it? Sur means south in Spain, whereas in France ’twas but a prefix equivalent to super — as in surcharge, or surmount. Surrealism embraced what was beyond realism, the mix of fact and fancy, the idiosyncratic, the strange, the “unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur” — anything and everything with the element of surprise!

Juxta simply means near to, or next, or beside, from Latin, and with the French poser, meaning “to place it,” there you have it, voila! Juxtaposition! Equals placing close together for contrasting effect.

As in this exposition we now have of visions unencumbered yet claimed to be endangered. Or is the danger in the seeing? Of course. Always. Semper fidelis.

Forgive the automatic writing. Or allow. Times and tides have resumed resurgence, have revolted, revolved, evolved, volted in, as in Superman and Saruman joining up to survive all that came and went before.    

So now we have 18 Filipino (two from UAE and the Netherlands) and 22 foreign artists (from 10 countries: Argentina, Austria, France, Germany, Latvia, Mexico, Serbia, Spain, USA and UK) ensuring juxtapositional if poetic undercurrents, as well as overtones that “exist in ambiguous relationships” — in a “convulsive joining” that becomes “a tool for revelation.”

Now we have in our midst our present-day Miros and Magrittes, Duchamps and Dalis, Ernsts and Rays (Max and Man), Buñuels and Bretons.

In Taguig, Metro Manila! At an international art exhibition, from Oct. 15 to 19, in the kindest if kinkiest bosom of SM Aura Premier — where selectively, collectively, the Forty Thieves of Time will exemplify “the Surreal, the Visionary and the Fantastic.”

From Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, curator Gromyko Semper corresponded with his like-spirited posse that he has now rounded up from all over renegade parts of Earth, to treat us to a balance of terror by way of art.

Endangered Visions features works of renowned surrealist artist and Salvador Dali protege Louis Markoya, visionary artist Otto Rapp, symbolist par excellence Danny Malbeouf, fantastic realist painter Maura Holden, lowbrow popsurrealist artist Jana Brike, among others, together with our own homegrown shock jocks, the ones whose brilliant works I have been privileged to be familiar with counting marvelous in Fernal artist Myko, Marcel Antonio, Mideo Cruz, Camille Dela Rosa, Kitty Taniguchi, Shirin Bhandari and Dengcoy Miel.

Together, they will “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” They will gift us with mythical, mystical, magical, mischievous juxtapositions, surpassing the susurrus of time’s own stream of a dream.

No one in this exalted company will be an epigone with the wind. And I’d rather that none wax philosophical.

Let’s take out all cerebral exercises now, as that would just be like having one’s cake and eating it, too. I say stick to pataphysics as a covenant’s ark, leave all notions of philosophical gravitas out in the rain at MacArthur Park, even if we don’t thnk that we can take it, however it took so long for Myko to bake it.

I am sure that much like Comte de Lautréamont’s famous line — “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” — this assembly of highwire visionaries who know no aerial surrender will be as enthralling as a pre-nup arrangement between archangels and daemons.