Checkout counter: Straight to the point

MANILA, Philippines - While I could talk to Karayom face to face, he insisted on wearing a mask for his portrait. Karayom, a sharp visual lyricist, sticks to a street name when it comes to making art. “I can freely criticize because Karayom doesn’t technically exist,” he says. Culled from Fernando Poe, Jr.’s 1995 film Kahit Butas ng Karayom, Papasukin Ko, his monicker is about social struggle, something he has internalized as he lives by a slum community. He makes art, sure, but he does so to incite thinking, not just to decorate.

When we visit one of his large-scale graffiti paintings, a bunch of colorful rotting heads half-sunk in sludge, we saw its wall surrounded by a private fence, and a giant construction bug hammering poles of prefab to the ground. A few months from now, as it chips and fades into oblivion, it will no longer be part of the city. Such is the temporary nature of his twenty-something wall art pieces found from Manila to Cavite, but they leave a lasting impression. This one is called “The High Rollers,” an ugly depiction of squanderous people painted in the poor’s midst.

A former apprentice to the psychedelic mixed media artist Dex Fernandez, Karayom revels in the same melange of colors as his mentor and combines it with uncertain, spontaneous, and rough lines of grit on public walls, canvas, and paper. He makes use of what’s at hand. For the heads, he only had leftover latex diluted with a lot of water. At work, he learned to make striking surreal sketches using only pens and highlighters, the other colors he borrows from coworkers because he only has one.

The results range from humorously irreverent, deeply melancholic, to violently angry. Through his hands, mundane objects like urinals and water dispensers become Technicolor symbols of religious follies, childhood games become bloody circuses, and doodle becomes an instrument of protest. All these are finished in the moment. “That’s how life is,” he says. “When something happens, you can’t repeat it. As you live, inspiration comes, and you spontaneously respond to it.”

An advertising graduate, he is a child of pop art — reassessing ATMs, Rambo slippers, and color printers into the urban experience — and he fully embraces the city in all its ironies to express multitudes of social and personal frustrations and sadnesses. When he reminisces over the heaving Coastal Mall in high neighborhood, he says, “Some stuff is expensive, and some stuff is cheap, but because it’s all in the same place, maybe a mall makes people equals.“

Because he can’t get enough of BAPE and BBC Ice Cream, which he likes wearing, he created “God-o-Flage,” an acid-tripped monogram of the Black Nazarene’s head. In a time of lack, art finds ways. “I want to make meaningful things,” he concludes. His city may be a dreaded place, but in it, consoling art persists.