Untitled Document

Man as animal, Animal as Man

By Alice G. Guillermo

Art: In one painting the female nude slithers on the floor to lick the stem of a cocktail glass, Red stiletto heels are signifiers of vanity as well as cruelty, since they are also weapons that crush without mercy.

The Tres Acidos, a group of painter-printmakers, including Joel Mendez, Ronald Ventura, Kiko Escora, Andres Barrioquinto and Butch Payawal, has come up with a show at the SM Art Center entitled Animal. The name Tres Acidos does not have to do with a membership of three (they are five participants here) but refers to the 3 percent of acid that is used in printmaking. Could it also mean the ingredients of acerbic irony that give subtle flavor to their work? Likewise, this is basically a thematic show being entitled Animal. The word "animal" itself, whether in English or in Pilipino, has a wide range of significations, beginning from the scientific and objective, as pertaining to a member of the animal kingdom which biologically includes humans as well as whales among the mammals, to its vituperative form in "Animal!," a Pilipino word of Spanish derivation uttered with a ringing accent on the second syllable.

Ronald Ventura deals with the human body in the form of male nude as a physical yet complex entity. According to him, he paints male nudes because they bear stronger residual taboo, unlike female nudes which have become common and predictable. But his male nudes greatly differ from the exercises and sketches that sometimes appear in gallery shows. Like run-of-the-mill female nudes, these other superficial productions have an element of cheesecake, now in a male version, meant to gratify particular tastes. But Ventura's nudes (he also does female nudes but more rarely now) have a complexity and artistic conviction that produce an aura, a haunting presence that lingers in the mind. He does believe that the body is a material shell, but it is also a vessel for the spirit, but this in a nonbinary way since the mystery lies in how the physical and the spiritual are fused together. In his personal aesthetic of the human figure, he would like to break down the rigid binary constructs of male/female, even as the symbols of yang and yin enclosed within a circle each contains the crucial element of the other. Thus, many of his figures have an androgynous quality and as they foreground gender equality and sameness, assume a universalist quality. This is indeed an ideal condition which he aspires for in his art, for reality, on the contrary, only too sharply delineates the power relations in gender relationships which are replicated in the political arena. His male figures thus have a haunting classical aspect. Part of this is his use of a smooth marmoreal tone rather than the usual brown flesh tones. As such, they seem to be bloodless beings, children of the moon. But to their flawless beings, quiet, with measured gestures as in the stances of the classical statuary, he introduces a trouble, as though garbled, passage as a reminder of finiteness and decay. At times, too, he plays on the interchangeability of man and animal, as when a standing figure, its hands spreading out in the tension of surprise, sprouts a donkey's head, the assertion of the unconscious.

For Kiko Escora, woman is represented as temptress, an erotic vamp, and thus enters into the Manichaean dichotomy of good and evil, implying that man is her willing or unwitting victim as he succumbs to her blandishments and ploys. He situates his figures in a spare setting of pink, red, white and black panels in untextured and solid color. Rendered in light, flesh tones, the nudes are sinuous and serpentine in form in various obvious attitudes of enticement. The visual props are few and simple: cocktail glasses, stiletto heels and cigarettes which constitute a specific iconography. Beyond these, the archetypal temptress Eve has become complicitous with the snake as she, too, has forked tongue, symbol of duplicity. In one painting, the female nude slithers on the floor to lick the stem of a cocktail glass. Red stiletto heels are signifiers of vanity as well as cruelty, since they are also weapons that crush without mercy. Sexuality here is stifling and predatory, outside the generous and redeeming impulses. Escora's painting of an upside down bovine carcass hanging on hooks is stark and ruthless in its image of predatory violence inflected on animals, and metaphorically, on humans, by unfeeling social order.

The present paintings of Andres Barrioquinto constitute a relationships and a dialogue between painter and subject, a narrative of a young woman who is the object of his love and fantasy in a series of small works in which she is the sole subject. There is also a certain minimalist tendency here where the young woman is portrayed like a wraithlike apparition in space, generally undifferentiated except, in a few works, by solitary stone structures of a mystical atmosphere. The stillness of the images and their soft, diffuse tones convey an impression of remoteness and distance, as though the figure of the young woman was viewed through the lens of memory and time, both appearing and disappearing. In the last work of the series, the image of the woman is replaced by a statue's head, that of a male, his eyes closed, white as plaster of Paris, lying on a stone ledge in the foreground, and casting a pale gray shadow on its surface. Behind him, a grassy field stretches up to the narrow horizon behind, marked by a low solitary building. It conveys a quiet, constricted, melancholy mood, bewildering, likewise, and mysterious. In the text accompanying it, the artist writes that he feels that the earth fall on him as it falls on a person being buried in the ground-a statement of deep sorrow. All the other works are accompanied by handwritten texts dwelling on the woman and his angst at his unfulfilled love. There is no question of the depth of feeling in the works, but it is conveyed through basically Western imagery, that of the truncated classical head on a ledge in a foreign landscape. Even more, the texts are in English which carries the risk of grammatical lapses in the realm of personal and intimate sentiments. Clearly, the use of the Pilipino would plumb deeper layers of feeling and communication since the language stems from the original identity as artist and Filipino.

The contribution of Butch Payawal to the show is a collection of self-portraits in charcoal and paper. He works in a spontaneous and cursory style in terms of line and tone in order to achieve an effect of flux and constant change. The face is like a mask which metamorphoses and extrapolates itself into a series of expressions which can continue ad infinitum. The very nature of change defines his own person which refuses to tie itself to any fixed essence but is always rediscovering itself, as charateristic of the human animal. In his present series, Joel Mendez has shown an absorbing fascination with the image of Imelda Marcos, but as to how it is related to the title is unclear in the works. Another artist proffered the explanation of pinakamagandang hayop sa balat ng lupa, as in the old Gloria Diaz starrer of the title. The artist does etherialize the familiar photographic images of Mrs. Marcos as he embellishes or marks them with esoteric symbols possibly related to the value system which she once formulated for public dissemination. He uses the images in relation to symbols or manipulates and superimposes them with materials such as rattan weaves to bring out unusual effects, at the same time that a sense of distance or dislocation emerges, as in metatext. Mendez produces open-ended ambiguities, both approaching and distancing; his personal psychological investment in the subject remains unclear. But, for sure, taking Mrs. Marcos as subject of painting series has its especial implications: indeed, it is not a face that one can simply manipulate in a purely formalist approach, as Albers's famous abstract series Homage to the Square. Nor can it just be treated with postmodern aplomb. For her image is heavily invested with political and historical significations. Never a private image, it is always a public image. More important, it carries with it a social baggage of ideological and emotional associations which one confronts even up to the present. A conflictive image, it is saturated through and through with the peoples memories of pain in struggle. Thus, even after 40 years, a formalist approach to Mrs.Marcos image cannot be viable.

Daily Inquirer, Art Section

April 14, 2002

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