Thursday, November 27, 2003
Cast of Colors, Light, VerveI can’t mince words when there’s so much great art going on in two of my favorite spots along the Boulevard. There’s
Verve in CocoAmigos—in that tucked-away, well-lit room that has become the preferred hangout for many Dumaguete diners and art lovers—and then there’s also
Cast of Characters in the lower room of The Spanish Heritage, a small exhibition place that has, of late, seen a resurgence of astounding artwork by some of our best young artists living in the city today.
I want to let the pictures do the talking for themselves—but I’m afraid even these are not enough. How can small jpeg photos do justice to the plays of light, shadows, strokes, colors, textures, themes? One might as well go to CocoAmigos, or The Spanish Heritage, and see the works for themselves. The exhibits run until the end of November—probably even the early part of December, but there’s no guaranteeing the artworks will still be there, since many of them have already been snapped up by patrons of Negrense art.
Artantula, the art and literature group headed by the indefatigable Sillimanian transplanted from Ateneo, the poet Niccolo Rocamora Vitug, was the first one to open with
Cast of Characters—a selection of works by seven young artists: Razceljan Salvarita—that prolific artboy (long, curly hair and all) whose new works still manage to astound me year after year, Rianne Salvarita, Donnie Luis Calseña, Trinna Montenegro, Hersley Casero, Mark Valenzuela, and Jana Jumalon-Alano.
Razcel’s recent works this time around seem to focus on Buddhist tenets and imageries, his pen and ink works—“Interplanetary Yin Yang” and “Jai Guru Dev Om”—are reworkings of the mandala, but full of the surreal eccentricities I have come to expect of his works. His sister Rianne’s works, however, are a revelation, something that tells me that artistry does run in the family blood. In
Cast…, Rianne offers her own versions of the Madonna and Child in a series of crayon-and-ink works on yellow paper which are somehow a re-imagining of the iconic figure in Matisse mode.
The dreamlike quality of the works continues in many of the other artists’ works as well. In Calseña’s “Unclad Purity,” we get feathery subjects in yellow-green, all of them somehow reminding me of a Rorsharch inkblot-test the answer to which is “a lot of vaginas.” The individual’s psychology does play a core in all the works here. In Casero’s mixed media paintings (“Motorsiklo” and “Experimento”), there is a strange juxtaposition of bright colors verging on the dark, and dreamlike silhouettes of people (ghosts?) seemingly haunted by berserk, flying motorized contraptions. Serious, heavy stuff, indeed—but which also finds an opposite twin in Montenegro’s ink works, this time (although still surreal) more playful: they are a playground of colors. I like “Psychedelic Dream”—it’s an intimate portrait of a woman with magic hair, with colors bursting into so many elements, she must be Medusa’s playful Mexican cousin.
Jumalon-Alano’s works bridge the two concurrent exhibits in her depictions of nude pregnant women in oil on canvas, clearly influenced by the stylistics of Manansala, but here given an urgency and feminine sensuality that is purely native and her own. (Given that she was also pregnant by the time these works came to light somehow gives them a kind of autobiographical feel.) In
Cast…, she simply calls these works “Bedlam 1” and “Bedlam 2,” but in
Verve, she finally gives these women identities: there’s Koko, there’s Fala, there’s Jada and Isabela. And one can’t help but somehow fall in love with these pregnant women, all of them a glow of yellow, all of them somehow somber but also strong.
Rianne’s works for Verve takes her far away from Matisse, and here she inserts her own vocabulary of fiery reds. In “Rain Dance,” she gives us an almost faceless woman in the nude—her effacement becoming her own personality. In “Gloria Adios,” she gives us three figures in a grid—a man? a woman crossing her legs? a baby? It doesn’t really matter, I think. But these works may also be the mark of an artist reaching for new heights in her expression. Here, her strokes and textures are fine and broad and assured, her theme possessed of a spirit.
Possession may be the word as well for Valenzuela’s ink works which utilize a redness so fiery they are bloody, and an imagery so startling they are, well, startling. In “Watching All Sunny Days,” “Red Moonlight,” “Red Boats,” and in the other works, the shadows are murders, the moons blood-red, the women—mostly twin figures with their hair tied together (or sharing the same hair?) tortured and serene all at the same time. He tells me: “The tied hair is a representation of a struggle to be a different person, an ideal one. The red moon is a symbol of protest—a revolt against the system of government, against the attitude of people.”
Rightly said.But
Verve, an exhibit which is supposed to bridge the gap between Dumaguete- and Bacolod-based artists, would not be the sensation it is now if not for the entry of painters from the other side of the island. Rodney Martinez, Orville Visitacion, and Roger Salvarita (Razcel and Rianne’s father) bring their brand of veteran artistry to Dumaguete in works so varied in their approach it was like viewing a banquet of images, all of them disquieting.
I am reminded of the Colombian painter Fernando Botero in the portraits of “ample” women in Martinez’s works. But again, the local supersedes the reference by being, in so many ways, original in depiction and sensuality. Martinez does all that in “Fruit Vendor,” in “Mother and Child,” and in “Violin Player,” all pastel women in pastel lives. In Visitacion’s paintings, on the other hand, we get landscape and still-life that may be soft and misty in their uses of color, but something in the composition hints of genius. “Sangkap Labada,” for example, is a simple still-life composed of a blue pail and two basins on a wooden table for laundry-wash, but there is a haunting in their stillness, in their being subjects… There is also something arresting in his “Kipot Falls”: the falls are mere backdrops of a panoramic landscape picture, and what are emphasized are the wet boulders in the foreground.
I am in love, however, with Rodney Salvarita’s works. Razcel’s father’s paintings seem to belie their own realism, their own genre of being landscape pictures. One sees that in “Legacy of San Sebastian Cathedral”—a picture of two bells drowned by red bricks. Three Spanish-style doors flank an old Spanish house, likes plaintive eyes overlooking a narrow street in “Lizares Old House.” In “Ancestral House,” a portico to another old house wraps itself gently round the structure, like a sad, slowly fading memory. The same feeling emanates in “Ventana,” his painting of a Miag-ao Church capiz-window. There is a certainly a sadness to the works, a kind of beautiful dread. And this is even more pronounced in “Entrada,” which may be the best painting in the series: Picture an old church stone doorway, which leads to shadows in angles like a heartrending tunnel, which in turn leads to a courtyard bathed by sun. And all these on a canvas of jalousies.
Beautiful.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
GO TO OLDER POSTS
GO TO NEWER POSTS
