Surreal, erotic, dreamy, zany art
ManilArt 2016 opens with a gala invitational on Oct. 6, Thursday, while public viewing will be from Oct. 7 to 9 at SMX Convention Center in SM Aura Premier, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig.
Over 30 galleries will be displaying around 600 artworks that are expected to highlight the current dynamism of Filipino visual art. Joining local galleries on this eighth year of the premier art fair are foreign participants: Ist. Ikon Abstractions of South Korea, Bruno Art Group of Singapore, and the Armenian Embassy.
The abundance will certainly be the high point for this week, in what continue to be unflagging seasons of a golden age of visual creativity, given record-setting triumphs in both local and international auctions for Philippine art. The ferment shows no signs of slowing down.
I wish I could laud all the participants in this raging fever, but understandably have to limit myself to those artists whose works I have become familiar with. But before I detail some of these that will be exhibited at ManilArt 2016, such has been the fevered calendar of recent shows by artist-friends that I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug other remarkable exhibits of late.
One such show has in fact come and gone: Hersley-Ven D. Casero’s “Sanctuary” which was on view at Art Verité Gallery in Serendra from Sept. 17 to 29. A photographer and visual artist from Dumaguete, Casero joined the “Chromatext Rebooted” show at the CCP Main Gallery late last year. His submissions drew attention and invites to join other group shows in Manila, leading to this first one-man show outside his hometown where he’s the resident artist at Foundation University.
Casero’s works have been featured in local and international publications, among these the inflight Smile magazine of Cebu-Pacific, the Lonely Planet, Los Angeles Times, Stern and other magazines in Germany and Denmark, as well as various e-sites and as book cover art.
Ten oil-on-canvas works ranging from 2’x3’ feet to 4’x5’ feet composed “Sanctuary” — on which the artist articulated:
“It’s where we’re safe and untouched by the unfamiliar. This is how we want to live. Within, we know we are always in fear of things we don’t understand. It’s not always made up of stars and rainbows. Sometimes, it’s of rains and storms. And so we protect ourselves with barriers so high and so strong.”
Our colleague in these pages, poet Carlomar Daoana, writes that Hersley’s representational surrealism “transports the viewer to this kind of place—magical, eerily quiet, redolent with wonder and watery light… an interior sanctuary, where the human not only communes with the natural world but fuses with it and is transformed by it, as evoked by the juxtaposition of bodies and corals, underwater creatures, and an explosion of birds.”
Only fitting for a gifted young artist born and bred in my own adopted hometown by the sea, where sanctuary is found all along and beyond its coast and highlands.
Dear friend Agnes A. Arellano opened her latest solo exhibit, “Born of the Moon,” last Thursday, Sept. 29, at Altro Mondo Arte Contemporanes at Picasso Residences in Salcedo Village, Makati. It was timed for the penultimate night of September, before the “Black Moon’s” birth of new life in darkness.
The series of erotological sketches, freestanding and in relief, resulted from field research Agnes did in 2008 in the holy erotic temples in Khajuraho, Central India — where the religious capital was known to be the holy city of the rajahs of the Chandella Dynasty, whose founder was believed to be “born of the moon.”
Couples are detailed engaged in a loving glance, tender embraces, and acrobatic positions between yogi and yogini adepts in the art of making love, “set in pre-computer-age Tablets for Instruction.”
Agnes writes further: “I have enclosed these scenes in the shape of church windows, topped with either a Gothic or Romanesque arch, while ensconcing the yab-yum couples in coco de mer niches. These are all rendered in the stark white of plaster, as the old temples would’ve been, to better catch the light of the moon.”
With their aesthetic delicacy that is also suggestive of spiritually, the erotological series is certainly more intriguing and pleasurable than any misogynistic sex tape. The show lasts till Nov. 2.
Another old friend and established artist, Roger Rishab Tibon of Baguio City, opens his solo exhibit “Lucid Dreamings” on Oct. 6, Thursday, at Art Elements Asian Gallery, Level 3, SM Aura Premier, on the same day as ManilArt 2016. In fact the gallery is right beside the SMX Convention Center.
Rishab acknowledges that all his works done in acrylic on canvas underwent a playful method of painting to simulate lucid dreams.
“Sometimes I start with an initial idea and then allow my unconscious mind to develop it and generate additional elements and images. The images are things that we sometimes see in the real world — whimsical, imagined and or a fusion of different images like a chimera.”
Eschewing preliminary sketches, he simply allowed each piece to unfold on canvas, with the interplay of both conscious and unconscious manipulations guided along by a contemporary surreal template. He worked on several pieces at the same time, going back and forth and finishing them simultaneously. Revisions and adjustments were done along the way, in the final stage, or even when the piece seemed to be completed.
The series features occluded portraits, or with partly hidden faces embellished with real and imagined images of flora and fauna and other unrelated objects. As with his previous works, there are no definitive statements. Rather are they open-ended both in rendition and interpretation.
Rishab says: “The viewers can interact with the paintings and weave their own interpretations, commentaries, appreciations or narrations.”
I confess to a partiality for the surreal or unusual. This applies as much to the works of a fellow who’s participating in ManilArt 2016 in a two-fold manner. Not only is Gromyko Padilla Semper having his sixth solo exhibition billed as “Fate in Flotilla: The New Major Arcana” (at Booth # A3), but he’s also curating a separate group show.
His individual exhibit’s title comes across as playfully irreverent, as the young artist has been with the themes he explores. It deals with the major cards in the Tarot deck, in a style that recalls Durer woodcuts and Japanese ukiyo-e prints, with flat colors and outlines but characteristically enriched with erotic and organic baroque details.
While paying homage to the wistful playfulness of Tarot cards, the illustrations reinterpret the occult figures with what Semper himself touts as “a savage eye, one that re-arranges the usual conformities of symbolic icons.” Fate and the reading of fortune are thus made uncertain and surprising as the elements that make up each card from the Major Arcana. The show’s title also tips its hat to ukiyo-e, meaning “pictures of a floating world,” suggesting “fleeting fortune.”
For its part, the collective exhibit he has curated and billed as “The Madtinkers’ Tea Party” takes direct cues from the Mad Hatter’s party in Lewis Caroll’s novels — as a richly textured Victorian tableau employing the eclectic sensibilities of contemporary art. The planned synergy among several artists evokes revelries that cut through social and artistic statements and lines of make-believe.
As an exercise in zany production design, the works compose a fill-in-the-blanks interactive trove of curiosities. Down the rabbit hole a viewer is expected to go, into a mad world where each contributing artist rethinks the characters in Carroll’s party scene. As a platform for collaboration, the labyrinthine installation has the artists finding common spaces and possibilities to work together, while inviting spectators to engage in their own adventures.
The “wonderland” has four areas built on imaginative conceits. One recreates a tea party, with an adjacent wall displaying works by Roman Padilla, Omar Flores and Leo Velasco.
The cake area features a long table laden with thematic cake sculptures of Thessa Maranan as well as the works of Gromyko Semper, Kitty Taniguchi and Titat Ledesma.
Semper’s painting titled “The Loco-Motive” alludes to the country’s current “mad train ride,” with characters in a steampunk pink train, an engine part of which is emblazoned with “Du30.” Under a tea table is a half-hidden corpse upon whose arm hangs a sign that says “Adik Sayo — Wag Tularan!”
The third area is a dark room with the sign: “More Madness Inside.” The tent-like arrangement with a Victorian circus atmosphere contains the works of Angelo Padilla, Boni Juan and Cheryl Hironaka, including sculptures of anatomical models of chimeric beings encased in glass vitrines. The last section is the so-called royal chamber, where Isobel Francisco’s painting offers another visual political quip: “Off with Their Heads!” Here too are the paintings of Camille dela Rosa and Janella Marie Ibay, who created a couture dress for the Red Queen, while Catherine Jannelle did another for the Red King.
Other artists contributing to the playful feast include Singaporean Siau Xindi, Herminio Tan Jr., Maria Magdamit and Tokwa Penaflorida. The fantastical collaboration can only underscore the range and depth of our cornucopia of art — from zen to zany and back, like a magical ride through delirium.
