Pablo Baen Santos' aesthetics of activism

If in a rare moment of clarity, our current leader (She Who Shall Not Be Named) decided to hang a Pablo Baen Santos painting in the Palace, it would be like Clytemnestra putting up a poster of Electra in her parlor, or the Queen Mother Alien admiring Sigourney Weaver with a Giger blaster. Hang for example Baen’s “Queen Kong,” which depicts a short simian woman lording over her banana republic. (Here’s a non sequitur about bananas: Didn’t Mark Lapid say with much camp those immortal lines in a forgettable flick of his: “Saging lang ang may puso!” Huh, may ganoon?) How would her political sycophants react to Baen’s paintings that unflinchingly detail social iniquities? Would they vomit all over their caviar, gargantuan steaks, and obscenely expensive wines and start counting their money in a hurry? Or order their henchmen to crank up to 11 their truncheons aimed at student protesters? Or say something that would embarrass even Marie Antoinette: “They don’t have rice? Let them eat Beluga.” I bet you they wouldn’t even notice the venom and satirical bile of the artworks. They would carry on. Blow their own trumpets, toot their own horns. Recite some outlandishly fictitious stats about economic progress or overcoming the recession, about how the country has gazillions of investments supposedly coming in. That this is the golden age of sorts.

A good thing we have social realists like Pablo Baen Santos who tirelessly expose the state of this nation — social ills, political abuses, warts and all — while other painters churn out flowers and nudes and still lifes, setting off the symphony of cash registers. Bob Dylan once said that you don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows. Yeah, but we do need someone with conviction to create images that will usurp the convenience of our daily lives. Render issues like corruption, poverty, extra-judicial killings, patronage politics, the harrowing conditions in the factories, or lack of a genuine land reform for the toilers of the land. To paraphrase Picasso, art is not just something to decorate homes but it is a weapon to be used against the enemy.

Baen doesn’t pull his punches. He says, “Sinasabi ng (Presidente) noon na ‘Let’s build a strong republic,’ tapos pinapahina niya lahat ng institutions kasi binaboy niya lahat eh — the military, elections, the justice system, ngayon binaboy niya National Artist Awards. Kahit sino pala puwede maging National Artist, basta sinabi ng Presidente.” 

Baen has practiced what Picasso preached as far back as the martial law days when he worked in underground publications. While others ingratiated themselves with the First Lady and her patronage of artists in her utopian City of Man, artists like Baen and cohorts Ato Habulan and Antipas Delotavo (they had their first show together in 1979), among other cause-oriented artists, struggled and starved for their art. Baen was the founding chair of Kaisahan, the first formal group of nationalist painters in the Philippines, formed during the Marcos regime. 

“Katakot-takot na discussion about nationalist art. Marami kasing artists refuse to mix politics and art. For them, it’s a desecration. (But for me), doon lang nagkaka real focus ang art. During primitive times pa lang, may purpose talaga ang art — ginagamit nila to invoke the gods for rains, for bountiful harvests or hunting. Noon pa, there was already a necessity for art. It had a social function, not just art for art’s sake.”

Baen has traveled the whole of the spectrum. As a student in UP, he experimented with landscape paintings, outrageous forms and even kinetic art. After graduation he worked in advertising companies and in The Sunday Times. During martial law he wrote and did illustrations for Ang Masa at Ang Taliba ng Bayan, congregating with writers such as radical thinkers like Satur Ocampo.

“’Yung movement namin sa art related sa nationalist literature, theater and music.” Baen’s friends include Jes Evangelista and Pete Lacaba.

Baen’s first one-man show was in a gallery in Bel Air owned by Susan Medina, the exhibition title being “Mga Di-Kalugod-lugod na Pangitain.”

“Militant nako noon pa,” he says. Asked how trying it was during the Marcos regime to pursue a nationalistic agenda in art, Baen answers, “I think artists by nature are provocative, and they create art that invites danger. I don’t know kung sino ’yung mga artists na sa simula pa lang gusto komportable na sila. Kung mahuli man, that’s just part of it.”

He’s still provocative after all these years, still straddles dangerous zones to this very day. But there’s a remarkable change in his artistic approach.

“I want to be whimsical with my new works,” Baen explains about his new suite of paintings currently on view at The Crucible in SM Megamall in a show titled “SMS.” Just like reading text messages, glancing at images quickly yields a barrage of suggestions. And according to the exhibition notes: “Baen has speckled most of his recent paintings with short, choppy inscriptions in the same breath that a gifted child would compulsively do on house walls, or artistic vandals on public walls.” Like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Jonathan Meese. Paintings with text allows Baen to use more color and indulge in a bit of child’s play on canvas. The artist is in constant search for more waggish approaches to exposing our country’s state of disunion.

“’Yung past paintings ko kasi very confrontational, gusto ko matapos na ’yung ganoong phase,” he shares, adding that he still wants to find his true nature in the visual arts. “Dito nakawala nako ng husto.”

Baen is used to painting under duress or pressure, but one particular painting proved to be more challenging to paint — physically. He injured his right hand after being pounced upon by his Dalmatian, so he used his left. “Napilitan akong gamitin ’yung kaliwa ko. It helped in the unpredictability of some lines.”

Talk about unpredictability, Baen admits to being more mellow now, having become a Christian in the 1990s. The artist realized, “There’s a disadvantage in pushing change so much, you tend to take shortcuts resulting in the reversion to the old ways. Nakita ko ’yan sa collapse of Communism in Western models. Now as a Christian, I have a tendency to wait in God’s time — ’yan ang pinakamatibay na change.” 

For Pablo Baen Santos, even Marxist or Leninist systems fail, with things inevitably descending into entropy. But some systems are incorruptible. Yes, the curtains will fall even on Queen Kong.

Regimes end.

Only God and art endure.