Epic orgies and tantric lotuses

Ongoing at the Galerie Hans Brumann Greenbelt 5 until the fourth Monday of June (22) is the two-woman show “Yabyum/Yantra” (Tantric Lotuses) by sculptor Agnes Arellano and painter Pardo de Leon, whose works here are as complementary as they come in the art scene this year. If last February was an occasion for artist-lovers to step up in their own joint exhibits, here now are two women putting forth the love act itself in all its heterosexual, tantric glory via cold-cast onyx (Arellano) and abstract acrylic (de Leon).

A modest assembly of taras serve as sentries at the entrance of the third floor gallery, Arellano’s shaping of the miniature female form in varied poses of nude meditation, indeed a teaser for the simmering religious sexuality of the other tantric lotuses waiting in ambush for the abject miron with some time to spare.

There are a pair of bells on a low-set table, one having the serpent as handle, the other a couple in union, both of which the gallery assistant prods the habitué to ring, and between the bells is a kris or small knife, symbol of power in repose.

Yet even from outside one can already espy the abstract de Leon orgies, never explicit or too graphic of bodies and sexes intertwined, unless the gallery-goer’s imagination has been further fired up by the ringing of bells like a bright idea or eastern, Buddhist philosophy.

The poet Gelo Suarez, in his booklet notes, writes of the “Om fetish” and, in almost sarcastic tone, suggests that art collectors (especially collectors of this particular art) are on the correct path towards non-attachment, if not outright enlightenment, whether sexual or spiritual, which could be one and the same thing.

As art writer and critic Gelo is reminiscent of AZ Jolicco de Cuadra, who used to frequent galleries as a cure for writer’s block, until lo and behold, he began to pick up the paint brush himself and sit before a canvas. Or is it the other way around? Because it is also possible that Jolicco used to frequent libraries to cure himself of artist’s block until he picked up a pen and began to write poetry.

But to return to the sex at hand, there is nothing outright titillating or prurient or extravagant here, just a dissimulation of a slow-burning libido, his or hers. Program notes say that Yabyum, Arellano’s take, has to do with the parent principle, and so depicting pairs in tantric embrace may be the artist’s tribute to a time before creation, or shall we say conception, because everything is pre-orgasm. Wasn’t it the great mystics that told us that withholding one’s come was a sure way to wisdom? Or to paraphrase Julius Caesar, I didn’t come yet I saw more than what was ever needed to be conquered.

Looking at those pairs in embrace, one can’t help but feel a bit envious, a little tulo laway, contemplating the man’s stoic expression and hand gestures, the woman’s throes beyond bliss and the position of her feet, their sexes melded together for all time, whether Agni, Vajra, or Mithuna Yabyum. The sculptures may be almost miniature, a size larger than bonsai, yet clearly they are on another plane.

We can only guess that here is where the eastern philosophy comes in, and we realize the work is merely the artist’s way of giving back to her creators, long since passed away in a fire in Pinaglabanan but now reborn in cold-cast onyx, the material, not the street.

The onyx cool as marble, like the iris of the artist’s anti-nihilist eye. The buck stops here, the artist could well have said.

On the Yantra parallel, de Leon’s pairs of pulsating lovers fill her canvases in acrylic, studies in assorted throbbings, palpitations, related thrusting and swirling colors on the verge of hypnosis.

Can’t help but be reminded of those epic orgies that had couples forming a human love chain, each one connected to another in an endless circle of sexual abandon. If in not so recent times the painter’s titles might be considered pornographic, the paintings themselves are suggestive enough to leave everything to the imagination.

Early on snatched up by a lone collector was the series “25 pairs of lovers pulsating,” three paintings with a digressing color of yellow in circular mode, echoing a title of a Galway Kinnell poem, “After making love we hear footsteps.”

However it’s more than footsteps we hear upon looking at de Leon’s paintings, most of which configure the imagined subjects in a kind of auto-hypnosis. What we see is not only what we get, but we also get all that we hoped to see.

The other paintings are just as subtly dissimulating: the heart, the swastika, the red and blue yantras, all swirling comfort, like the pairs of lovers pulsating.

The acrylic may contain visions of what it’s like during the tantric experience, as if stepping onto a mountaintop and breathing the rarefied air, and seeing from afar the entangled limbs and branches.

De Leon’s work is now leagues away from the late 1980s when she won the 13 Artists award fresh out of the UP College of Fine Arts, where her mentors included the conceptual master Chabet.

Years away from nights out at the old Club Dredd off Scout Tobias, wearing a mini skirt. As if the night itself were wearing a mini skirt.

Come to think of it, “Yabyum/Yantra” is not only a good cure for writer’s block. The exhibit could well serve as a mental aphrodisiac, or at least inspire in the viewer a fair appreciation and respect for sex. There’s nothing that a yummy tantric mantra can’t fix.