Those moments of nothingness

Let’s be honest. When it comes to the “art scene,” there are two kinds of people: the winners and the losers. The winners are the artists — more importantly the business behind the artworks and the artists, and the people involved who have successfully made a brand out of their work, marked it with a price they deem fit (usually absurd), and sell it to a market. In this scenario, we are the losers — the naïve market who value these works not always because of the painstaking skill or creativity put into it, but the cultural plus points they add to our ostentatious reputation by being able to appreciate something not everybody is educated enough to understand: its abstractions and history. In other words, it’s an interesting game that relies on what isn’t understood — oh, but don’t we just love it.

Trilogy Boutique, a small lifestyle store with a unique mix of fashion merchandise (and a charming little canteen), has lately tapped into this art thing, stripped of all pretenses. The first art show is an attempt to incorporate themselves into this scene, sort of a statement of breaking free from the higher institutions of art galleries and museums, attempting to say perhaps, “Hey, we can make art too. And maybe we know it better.”

The first show is “Little Wonder,” a solo show by musician, illustrator and painter Nix Puno, resident bassist for local indie bands Us-2 Evil-0 and Zach and the Action Pact. Nix’s works embody that transient moment that resembles something he might have felt while listening to hip-hop drum lines, focusing on the steady rhythm of nothingness and space.

His works are not afraid to go to the extreme opposite of horror vacuii, or the fear of leaving blank spaces that is so prevalent among Filipino artists who attempt to fill every nook and cranny on the canvas. Nix says, for him, he was completely veering away from this notion, something he wasn’t taught as a child.

Inspired by spaces: These moments define happenings in a larger picture and context, something included in every plan.

His minimalistic style, references to American pop culture and simple clean compositions may make art more accessible to the youth, something that shouldn’t be that difficult to understand. The works speak in a silent, calm and inconsequential manner, but are driven with movement, action and character. Take that one piece with Brad Pitt for example, or the one with the lonesome portrait of Quentin Tarantino’s samurai sword. This is a culture that the upper-class Hollywood-ized youth of the Philippines should be able to understand without much thought.

The sentiment is commendable and cute, as “Little Wonder” invites this generation to appreciate the canvas. The obvious existentialism of the art world, though, is that no one can truly take control to define what it is, and what it is to this generation seems to be a complex mix of indie and lifestyle in the context of a borrowed culture as seen in the opus of Nix Puno’s musically inspired canvas.

In the art scene, after all, there are winners and there are losers. Like all other massively constructed businesses disguised as social institutions — everybody thinks they are the winners. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. And just like Nix Puno’s works capture one small moment within the context of a larger truth, this movement embodies just the same.

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Check out the show “Little Wonder” in Trilogy Boutique at 110 Alvion Center, Rada Street, Legaspi Village, Makati City until August 19.