Untitled Document

Distortion as Metonym

By Jose Tence Ruiz

It is an anatomical anomaly, to be sure, this image of a woman's abdomen with the umbilical cord extruding from the navel. It will have to work only as a overstretched metonym, and somehow, one feels that Andres Barrioquinto, 23 years young, precautious, compulsive portraitist has come down to a part of the body with which he is not in his depth. We may definitely be accused of taking the reading into too literal a field, just as much as when one examines a painting of a face in most modern/post-modern occasions and hopes for a Grecian placement for the nose and nostrils, and instead finds one warped into the arena of gesture-as-content metaphor in the manner of Francis Bacon (whom Barrioquinto incidentally admires.) And if distortion of or deviation from the anatomical figures found in the medical books is not allowed some leeway, then, why resort to it at all?

Barrioquinto recounts the period surrounding the making of Umbilical. It was a point when, responding to a brief to depict his notion of ownership vis-à-vis women's bodies, he found himself estranged from a girlfriend, where the resultant torpor was something that even this draftsman found too debilitating to shake off. How does one care about the question at all? How does one care about the fate women when women seem not to care about his? To the artist came a transcendent answer. For there was one woman who would care, show or not to show, girlfriend or none, the woman from whom he took his own umbilicus.

This particularly non-too Vesalian metaphor would have to be crude, direct, visceral, unthinking, blindly instinctive. But in moments of parental, nay, maternal redemption, all of the above descriptions would apply. Mothers love in an enigmatically redemptive manner. Their salvific warmth would appear to come straight from the navel, brutally non-negotiable caring, Worthy of a metaphor brut.

In the last few years, the young Barrioquinto consistently flashed this penchant for the expressive "regurgitation" of images. In this sense the images are ingested with the eyes, mentally and emotionally masticated. From their original configuration, the images are re-arranged, readjusted and keyed into a keen emotional pitch by his direct and near-seismographic rendition of line and faded color. One cannot but reference Northern European alienation, similar to that shared by Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and even the regally acerbic but elegant Gustav Klimt.

Barrioquinto, who, in his pre-adolescent years was already a restless draftsman, found himself dragged into the anxiety-ridden lot of a teenager displaced by migration. With his journalist father having moved the family to Hongkong just two years after Corazon Aquino's magic as EDSA's Joan D'Arc was beginning to yellow, Andres had to cope with growing up in what was then described as one of the world's rudest cities.

He sought refuge in comics, the mordant post/punk wit of Stephen Morrisey and The Smiths, the elegant skepticism of Oscar Wilde's prose, poetry and memoires. There were the nights, too, spent at the video arcades, where the violence programmed into the gaming would often enough seep into real space and time. To say the least, Andres' encounter with the teen gangs who lorded it over the arcades and showed no tolerance for this tall, taciturn Filipino, who often beat them at their electronic turf, was another motherlode of emotion that would fuel his next few years of artmaking.

Andres' father opted to return to Manila in the mid-90s, partly encouraged by a better economy in the Ramos years, and partly he was deeply concerned that the violence Andres was getting exposed to might have irreversible effects.

Coming back to study Fine Arts gave Andres a measure of decompression. Using schooltime to produce a thick body of paintings and drawings, his visual work opened a valve to an inner purge. His portraits could be generally bracketed under what teens then labeled Gothic which, did not refer to flying buttresses and rose windows but rather to brooding, candlelit chilly, dark interiors as the setting for the horrific, as in Notre Dame and the Hunchback. Gothic was appropriated to describe a post-punk sub-genre that took in strains of heavy metal, sci-fi and the arid and detached nihilism of a generation raised on the hypnotic techno-terraine of the computerized dungeons and dragons, Gameboy, Nintendo and cyberspace.

Andres took up Fine Arts at the University of Santo Tomas which, while being noted for having instigated both the modern and postmodern agenda in the Philippine art, retained a roundly academic curriculum based on the colonial tradition of the European salon and late Eighties resurgence of figuration via the Social Realist influence of Habulan, Delotavo and Talusan Fernandez. Andres settled himself into this, yet produced reams of distorted portraiture that effectively displaced him from this training. Only his consistency convinced his instructors that he was capable of moving forward or not he absorbed the modes prevalent in school. And move forward he did, finding approbation in winning major art competitions, i.e. the Art Association of the Philippines, the Metrobank, the Nokia Art Awards and even gaining a slot at the Taipei Biennial for Drawing in 1999.

Despite his psychological asynchrony from the curriculum, he was given the UST Benavidez Award, one of the highest crossover honors the university gave its graduates. And all of this for applying the very same angst-soaked sensibility to paint a series of confessories, groupings of melancholic/strung-out visages of friends, peeves, neighbors and loved ones.

It is often culturally-ingrained denial reflex to say that exaggeration, when applied to people one has affection for, is at the very least, unflattering, if not outright demeaning. In Andres' case, it is frank, if idealistic depiction of unqualified closeness, a warts-and-all kinships with those immediately around him. He need not feed on the sensibilities of Bram Stoker, or Alex Nino or any other au courant spokesman of urban alienation to formulate his portraits. He need only look out at his compound, located in the dreary Tandang Sora district, and observe the unbearable lightness of mortality that surrounds him.

There would be his grandfather, near-senile yet alive, his younger brother afflicted with Down's Syndrome, his neighbors living lives of quiet desperation to feed his voracious urge to draw.

In the context of this exhibit, Andres would be relatively underaged, and possibly underexperienced to give a profoundly nuanced account of his encounters with women and their corpus. His efforts would have to be seen as ruminations on what could be, not on string of what-they-were. Having just disengaged from a relationship outside of his own nuclear family, Barrioquinto would therefore file his opinions about such under work-in-progress. But vision cannot and should not be hothoused and we may have to learn to enjoy the rawness of his corporal naivete, as well as appreciate that, at his stage, his relationship with a woman, now begun in its cycle of fits and starts, would still be linked to home. He did admit that the breakup between him and his girlfriend served to indirectly refocus on his primordial bond with his father and the umbilical one, his mother. Hence, the anatomical misrepresentation becomes a guileless, but nevertheless heartfelt summation.

In light of the premises posed by the operative question here, there is an answer indicated. For Andres Barrioquinto, the answers to "Who owns women's bodies?" has become clear. They belong to nobody if they do not belong to her children.

WOWB Book

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