Images of A Private Hell

By Alice Guillermo

Besides the incisions, there are also drippings that mark the figures and their habitation. From the mouth of several figures blood issues forth

STOP Killing Me! begs the title of Barrioquinto's latest show at the West Gallery in Megamall. But the scream for mercy is muffled, as though issuing from a cavern made of layers of numb flesh and empty bones. Human figures, almost all often male, as in The Shadow Boxer, appear frontally as though in a pose of quiet but intense confrontation or accusation. But they are way past launching any physical challenge or verbal vituperation, for they are like zombies with one foot in the grave. These oil paintings are in predominant brown with passages of yellow and red, as well as tones of gray and black for tone and the definition of forms. They are unframed, creating the effect of being part of the viewer's space. Often, the subjects are human figures, but there are a number of abstract paintings which create a mood associated with a site and place. In two paintings, The Shadow Boxer and Nocturnal Me, there is a dual image of the standing male figure and its full skeleton side by side. In the first, it is a clothed full figure, while in the second it is a fleshy nude torso, devoid of any. physical appeal, its exposed parts sadly ludicrous. Always, they belong to. another plane, outside the living, breathing plane of existence. They are like reified exhibits of human bark, their claim to identity thin and fragile, lacking the density of life. Clothes, if at all, are purely ritualistic. Their eyes, without the dark irises that focus sight, are only , empty and blind apertures that make no contact with the exterior world. They are like blind windows or arches of abandoned structure. As such, the figures have a profoundly alienated aspect: a single touch may cause them to collapse into a pile of moldy ashes or melt them into their skeletons. When nude, the flesh is gray and bloated one's private shame and the secret habits of the body mercilessly laid bare. One would think of it as flesh in a slaughterhouse were it' not so bloodless and inert. In them, the human body's grace has fled; there are no seductions of an erotic or sensuous nature.

The artist does not shrink from depicting skulls and skeletons which construct a grim imagery of death. In the deformed skulls, the bony rictus is a frozen sneer or snarl rather than a smile. The skeletons are often full length with the rhythmic arching bones of the rib cage that enclose an empty space where life has long since fled. But in them, the artist transgresses anatomy, . because the horizontal pattern of the ribs continues down the abdomen to the legs in a contrast between light solid form and dark empty space. In this unremitting grimness, one can count the bones in sequence, and such a numerical operation only heightens the quality of reification-all bones accounted for in an inhuman reckoning like that of the cash register, possibly. In the paintings which juxtapose the clothed figure or the nude with the skeleton, this do not convey a contrast between life and death or between the living flesh and the bony structure within. Rather, this juxtaposition only brings out two planes or levels of death: the inert flesh, clothed or unclothed, and the bones, complete in their ball-and-socket joints and their lengths, hollow and brittle. Doubtless, in the history of art, nudes, or the human figure in general, have been often departed from the representation of ideal form within the classical aesthetics. It has been pointed out by Kenneth Clark that in Rembrandt's nudes, such as Bathsheba, the rendering of the fleshly body, its lines and striations, lumps and irregularities of form, and uneven distribution of tones, its very history of use and abuse, is such that it expresses the living spirit within, its movements, impulses, aspirations and desires, its very quality of being human in an individual way. So that even in the imperfections of the flesh, there is a transcendence over the material and the physical toward spiritual significations. Rembrandt also did use the subject of the carcass in the slaughterhouse. In this, too, there was a transcendence over the gory physical fact to an aesthetic of light bathing vulnerable form like an unexpected benediction. This, too, was apparent. in the works of Chaim Soutine on the same subject.

However, in these paintings of Barrioquinto, the theme of transcendence over the physical is not central but only incidental. This theme may operate in a number of the works, however. In Solitary, which shows a face softly emerging from the shadows, there is a yellow flood of light on the side. On the surface, this light brings in a dramatic effect to an otherwise quiet monochromatic work in brown tones. But its significations are ambiguous. It may be a supernatural presence impinging on the scene, although no relationship is shown between the woman's face and the flood of light. It may signify a redeeming potential since the face is quiet and inward, of a contemplative cast. In other paintings, the light appears beside the skeletal structure which seems to be bending toward it from the darkness. It may be possible to read intimations of redemption in the passages of light, but these may be resisted by the quality of these luminous passages. These are gritty, roughened by tiny sand like particles, as well as by graffiti scratching as though done by fine nails or blades that scar the surface with long marks.

The effect of these graffiti is quite physical, alluding to sadistic markings on skin. They also hint at punishment, physical and spiritual. On looking at them, one feels the grating movements smarting with physical pain. And pain is an essential part of the virtual existence of these figures, although it has been muted from having endured it for so long. What are left are the traces, marks and scars that they bear through all their levels of life-in-death. But besides the incisions, there are also drippings that mark the figures and their habitation. From the mouth of several figures blood issues forth in a continuous flow, indicating the extremity of existence. Color washes are made to drip in long, fluid stains. Sometimes these drippings are dark, like blood from old wounds.

Today Newspaper

July 1, 2001

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