CAN an empty room disturb?
At first, when I entered the Cebu City Museum last weekend, the silence was like a canvas splotched with the distant clamor of the streets, the freezing rush of the air-conditioning unit, and the flight of the dust motes.
Being in a roomful of art can never be serene for long.
On exhibit till the end of January, “Contemporary Cebu,” curated by J. V. Castro, is an excellent hole to disappear into for any visitor or even native who mistakes Cebu to be an interminable fiesta.
The Senyor Sto. Niño, a child imbued with the paradoxical powers of a king, a soldier and a Patron, is an apt metaphor for the contradictions of spirituality that pulse from the works of Wenceslao “Tito” Cuevas and J. Karl Roque (explored in this space last Sunday).
There is nothing unequivocal about the visions coming from Dennis “Sio” Montera. His “Final Warning on Global Warming” is a massive stage bursting with warm pastels and whites, threaded with ominous black snakes of bitumen. Cebu, with its overflowing dumps, flashfloods and flyover complex, is a carnival with a countdown, Montera seems to say with his other works, “A Painful Crescendo” and “The Fire Within”.
Since I first covered Montera in mid-2000, I consider bitumen every bit a signature as his apocalyptic vision. A byproduct of decomposed organic materials, bitumen (asphalt or tar) has been used for ages by people. Yet while the ancients have used this thick, shiny material to seal their reed boats and mummies, modern societies use this principally to bind asphalt in roads and meet the demand by refining crude petroleum oils, a stark prediction for where mankind is heading to.
Although much diminished in size compared to Montera’s, the works of Marvin Natural are as unsettling. Too brief is the refuge taken amidst the angles and lines created by tree trunks and branches as this is quickly dispelled by the clangor of artwork titles that read like breaking headlines: “Storm Leaves 2.9T Stranded” and “Heavy Rains and Strong Winds Hit Cebu, Pag-asa Says It is Just Low Pressure”.
Lightning stuns first before thunder hits. So it is with the black and white art of Kidlat. Hung outside the museum, the posters I brushed past at first. Then I went back because of something that snagged my eye. In “Tower,” a pile of pancakes has a knife impaled on it, oozing a viscous liquid that looks more like blood than syrup. In “Last Dance,” an empty chair stands desolate in a sea of blood and discarded knives.
“Piñata” and “Candy Strings” made me feel I had gatecrashed a mad children’s party or peeped into a nursery witnessing an unspeakable act. The black triangles of candy suspended from a string should not even be touched, lest they explode and mangle. There is an ancient rocking horse with torn bandages. According to Kidlat, art is not a broken nail dragged against a board; it is the unease lingering after the nail rips.
In this sea of disquieting inanimates, I thought faces would be sanctuaries. Palmy Pe-Tudtud and Vidal Alcoseba Jr. deny this. Masks stare from the disembodied faces writhing in Tudtud’s “Solidarity” series in red (I), brown (II) and blue (III). Are these the visages of the disappeared, ironic about social justice? Or the pretences donned and discarded by those courting our confidence?
Alcoseba skewers the state of the human with black, grey and dingy white. In this order, I viewed “Untitled 3,” where the defined musculature of a figure’s shoulders inexplicably ends in a twisted mouth and absent hands; terminated in “Untitled 2,” where a riot of lines crisscross like barbed wire, oozing shadows; and finally redeemed in “Untitled 4,” the darkness framing two beacons of light: what may be a chalice of gold and a dove.
Thanks to Ritchie Quijano’s mixed media sculpture, the only three-dimensional works in the exhibit, I found myself treading the backwash of impressions. Quijano creates art from found pieces of hardwood and waste. “Babel” resembles a modern anito, and “Tooth,” bristling with tubes, screws and blades, reminds me of a cannibalized guitar or pelvis.
Yet in dread is the equilibrium. A small screw propping the bottom balances the four levels of the pyramid in “Babel”. Take away this nonentity and this illusion collapses. Art, though perceived by some as an indulgence, creates the space that enables victims to squeeze out and walk away from disasters immemorial.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 15, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Saturday, January 07, 2012
Instructive accident
AN INSTRUCTION on reading or cultural resurgence?
In search of the “Contemporary Cebu” exhibit, I stood outside the wrong museum. Answering my inquiry about modern art, the guard at the Museo Sugbu pointed out a tarpaulin announcing recently excavated artifacts.
Rereading the invitation, I discovered the venue was not the provincial museum but the Cebu City Museum. For old-timers, the Rizal Memorial Library and Museum is a landmark I’ve come to associate more with neglect and renovation rather than any cultural stirring.
Yet, if it is now possible for a native Cebuano to get into a museum mix-up, this may still foretell of the blooming of the city of my birth.
It’s an expectation the renovated Cebu City Museum meets. In place of the dark recesses and creaking floorboards that, while redolent with the patina of years, reinforced the museum’s mothballed state is a space of light, height and vision.
This extravagance of light and space is exploited by the “Contemporary Cebu” exhibit, which has all works except two of Ritchie Quijano’s sculptures mounted or ranged along the walls.
In the late 1980s, J. Karl Roque’s lifelike depictions of marine creatures exerted an impact like photojournalism: seeing the bounty up close underscored the evanescence I witnessed in my work with nearshore communities.
Roque’s 2011 diptych, “In His Eyes,” brings back the sensation except this time, instead of observing and judging, I am immersed, part of a silent but not inarticulate world. An undertow of spirituality is created by the title and the blurred glimpse of beauty, as a diver perceives the bottom of the sea roiled up in a storm.
Roque’s “After the Storm” and “Scent of the Morning Rain” are, poetically and visually, depictions of healing and resurgence. Each work is circular, with a hole painted off-center, bringing to mind an artist’s palette awaiting a hand to mix the colors interpreting reality.
At first glance, the spirituality of Roque is reflected in Wenceslao “Tito” Cuevas’s huge canvases. Stand before the works long enough and the child-like innocence of the pastels and the figures shift and move till the viewer realizes that meditating with Cuevas leads her down a different path.
Deified or vandalized? Cuevas’ contact print of Holy Family images, “Do Not Enter Our Aura with Your Hysteria,” has bright yolk yellow suffusing the iconic Sto. Niño. Is this splash of color the gold leaf of veneration? Or splatters of superstition defacing faith like rotten eggs hurled by unbelievers?
In “Amen (So Be It),” white smudges obliterate a sea of faces. The symbol of purity, white here is anything but restful. Cuevas wields the color with the icy precision of an executioner expunging, reducing the canvas not to the original state of blankness but the bleakness of a death-soaked field.
From nil to nil. This leaps out during that afternoon of walking around the Cebu City Museum exhibit. In the works of Roque, the phrase rises like a benediction, undeserved and all the more precious for being bestowed.
Yet, taking a few steps across the room or twisting the glance, I encounter the same phrase, bristling with innuendoes, in the Cuevas works. The artist is a razor stripping away the layers with which we cover our nakedness and exposing what lies pitifully at the core of our pretences.
The “Contemporary Cebu” exhibit opens portals for viewers to step inside and through. For curator J. V. Castro, the assembled works are revelatory of the maturity and complexity of art produced by local artists. He wrote that the works defy the caricatures of provincial art, or the sort of pastoral scenes art experts in Manila imagine are being created and appreciated outside Manila.
As one who has never left home, I am not startled by what has been growing in the backyard all this time. It pleases me though that the organizers—the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI), the Alternative Contemporary Art Studio and The Grove by Rockwell—have assembled until Jan. 31 this breadth of artistic vision that refracts realities, unique to Cebu and at the same time, universal.
That this third element—vision—finds its way into an old landmark given new relevance—formerly the Rizal Memorial Library and Museum, now the Cebu City Museum—pleases this true-blue Bisdak even more.
(To be continued next Sunday)
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 8, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column
In search of the “Contemporary Cebu” exhibit, I stood outside the wrong museum. Answering my inquiry about modern art, the guard at the Museo Sugbu pointed out a tarpaulin announcing recently excavated artifacts.
Rereading the invitation, I discovered the venue was not the provincial museum but the Cebu City Museum. For old-timers, the Rizal Memorial Library and Museum is a landmark I’ve come to associate more with neglect and renovation rather than any cultural stirring.
Yet, if it is now possible for a native Cebuano to get into a museum mix-up, this may still foretell of the blooming of the city of my birth.
It’s an expectation the renovated Cebu City Museum meets. In place of the dark recesses and creaking floorboards that, while redolent with the patina of years, reinforced the museum’s mothballed state is a space of light, height and vision.
This extravagance of light and space is exploited by the “Contemporary Cebu” exhibit, which has all works except two of Ritchie Quijano’s sculptures mounted or ranged along the walls.
In the late 1980s, J. Karl Roque’s lifelike depictions of marine creatures exerted an impact like photojournalism: seeing the bounty up close underscored the evanescence I witnessed in my work with nearshore communities.
Roque’s 2011 diptych, “In His Eyes,” brings back the sensation except this time, instead of observing and judging, I am immersed, part of a silent but not inarticulate world. An undertow of spirituality is created by the title and the blurred glimpse of beauty, as a diver perceives the bottom of the sea roiled up in a storm.
Roque’s “After the Storm” and “Scent of the Morning Rain” are, poetically and visually, depictions of healing and resurgence. Each work is circular, with a hole painted off-center, bringing to mind an artist’s palette awaiting a hand to mix the colors interpreting reality.
At first glance, the spirituality of Roque is reflected in Wenceslao “Tito” Cuevas’s huge canvases. Stand before the works long enough and the child-like innocence of the pastels and the figures shift and move till the viewer realizes that meditating with Cuevas leads her down a different path.
Deified or vandalized? Cuevas’ contact print of Holy Family images, “Do Not Enter Our Aura with Your Hysteria,” has bright yolk yellow suffusing the iconic Sto. Niño. Is this splash of color the gold leaf of veneration? Or splatters of superstition defacing faith like rotten eggs hurled by unbelievers?
In “Amen (So Be It),” white smudges obliterate a sea of faces. The symbol of purity, white here is anything but restful. Cuevas wields the color with the icy precision of an executioner expunging, reducing the canvas not to the original state of blankness but the bleakness of a death-soaked field.
From nil to nil. This leaps out during that afternoon of walking around the Cebu City Museum exhibit. In the works of Roque, the phrase rises like a benediction, undeserved and all the more precious for being bestowed.
Yet, taking a few steps across the room or twisting the glance, I encounter the same phrase, bristling with innuendoes, in the Cuevas works. The artist is a razor stripping away the layers with which we cover our nakedness and exposing what lies pitifully at the core of our pretences.
The “Contemporary Cebu” exhibit opens portals for viewers to step inside and through. For curator J. V. Castro, the assembled works are revelatory of the maturity and complexity of art produced by local artists. He wrote that the works defy the caricatures of provincial art, or the sort of pastoral scenes art experts in Manila imagine are being created and appreciated outside Manila.
As one who has never left home, I am not startled by what has been growing in the backyard all this time. It pleases me though that the organizers—the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI), the Alternative Contemporary Art Studio and The Grove by Rockwell—have assembled until Jan. 31 this breadth of artistic vision that refracts realities, unique to Cebu and at the same time, universal.
That this third element—vision—finds its way into an old landmark given new relevance—formerly the Rizal Memorial Library and Museum, now the Cebu City Museum—pleases this true-blue Bisdak even more.
(To be continued next Sunday)
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 8, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column
Friday, January 06, 2012
A grain of sand
THIS is my theory: if one lives by the sea, one must be reconciled to always living with a grain of sand.
The final days of the old year deposit our family on the southern coast of Cebu. The sullen sky, the turbulence of the surf and the chill in the air create a spell of solitude that keeps away weekend worshippers but summons us, who crave a rest from the festivities ushering in a new year.
Yet, while it’s true that we want some respite from holiday-making, it’s also misleading to give the impression that the coastal solitude at this time of the year is quiet and placid.
For one, the sea, like any creature of moods, is never silent. One dawn I woke up suddenly. It took me a second to realize what I was missing: the violence of the surf pounding the shore. Only when I flexed my toes and touched the inevitable grains of sand on the bed did I realize I was where I was when I had gone to sleep.
As a child, I already realized that sand leaves the longest memory of interludes at the coast. Whenever it was time to go home, we children were told to rinse our feet and sandals for the last time in the sea.
Yet, no matter how carefully and slowly we walked back to the car, there would always be sand sticking at the back of our legs. The more one rinsed, the more sand clung. It pleased me to always hold off going home by hollering I would wade “one last time”.
Only to find, weeks later, in the middle of a gym session, I would be fingering sand in the pocket of a pair of shorts I waded in at sea.
I brushed sand again when I watched the works exhibited by Raymund L. Fernandez in his SM City Cebu retrospective, “Bulahan ang Bunga sa Tiyan Mo,” from Dec. 23, 2011 to Jan. 4, 2012.
Mons, my former teacher and now colleague at the University of the Philippines Cebu, gathers works that touch on the religious. In an interview, he said that for his first one-man show in over 10 years, he had to choose between this theme and nudes, the other significant body of works he’s made over the years.
Those with greater empathy for the flesh than the spirit should still visit the exhibit. As an artist, Mons has never been caged in by themes. The “Bulahan” works rub raw my preconceptions of spirituality.
His “Belen” is a block of bayong carved to show the dominant visage of St. Joseph and the smaller image of the Virgin Mary, cupping a Niño, a reversal of roles in all the stories of the manger birth I’ve heard.
In “Sta. Maria Asuncion,” reportedly a 400-year-old found piece of molave illustrating the Assumption, the faces and the feet of the angel and Mary are distended in rapture I immediately associate with the sexual, having had no experience of the spiritual variety.
More curious is the story behind Mons’ “Bulahan ang Bunga sa Tiyan Mo,” which shows magkuno inlays portraying the face, hands and feet of Mary, set off against the molave body. It is not only the starkness of dark wood against white that startles. It is the realization that one is looking at an image of the pregnant Mary, an oddity in traditional iconography that shows Mary at the Annunciation, fast forward to Mary in the Manger, skipping other allusions of the flesh.
According to Mons, discussions over a possible commissioned work on Mary fell through. That same night, he dreamed of a woman sitting on a log, who then looks back at him and says, “I have for you a gift.” Waking up, he dismisses it as a “diabetic” dream.
On the same day, his brother, Londong, tells him about finding a molave trunk abandoned near their ancestral home in Dumanjug. It takes Mons another two years to finish the carving of Mary, which he later gives to the Congregation of St. John. While the sculpture was in progress, his younger son, Elias, often kissed the molave bump, a natural formation of the wood that inspires the “Bulahan” theme.
In “Timon,” a molave trunk carved to show a fisherman steering in a storm, I find a clue to Mons’ view of the religious shaping a life. What I mistook at first for a devil lashed by the storms of faith into covering his face is a mere mortal whose enormous feet express the tremendous effort of will and sinew to steer on course.
Faith is not passive acceptance. It is recognizing the anomalous, even doubt, to prove the existence of faith. Very much as a grain of sand brings back in a rush a whole interlude.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 1, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column
The final days of the old year deposit our family on the southern coast of Cebu. The sullen sky, the turbulence of the surf and the chill in the air create a spell of solitude that keeps away weekend worshippers but summons us, who crave a rest from the festivities ushering in a new year.
Yet, while it’s true that we want some respite from holiday-making, it’s also misleading to give the impression that the coastal solitude at this time of the year is quiet and placid.
For one, the sea, like any creature of moods, is never silent. One dawn I woke up suddenly. It took me a second to realize what I was missing: the violence of the surf pounding the shore. Only when I flexed my toes and touched the inevitable grains of sand on the bed did I realize I was where I was when I had gone to sleep.
As a child, I already realized that sand leaves the longest memory of interludes at the coast. Whenever it was time to go home, we children were told to rinse our feet and sandals for the last time in the sea.
Yet, no matter how carefully and slowly we walked back to the car, there would always be sand sticking at the back of our legs. The more one rinsed, the more sand clung. It pleased me to always hold off going home by hollering I would wade “one last time”.
Only to find, weeks later, in the middle of a gym session, I would be fingering sand in the pocket of a pair of shorts I waded in at sea.
I brushed sand again when I watched the works exhibited by Raymund L. Fernandez in his SM City Cebu retrospective, “Bulahan ang Bunga sa Tiyan Mo,” from Dec. 23, 2011 to Jan. 4, 2012.
Mons, my former teacher and now colleague at the University of the Philippines Cebu, gathers works that touch on the religious. In an interview, he said that for his first one-man show in over 10 years, he had to choose between this theme and nudes, the other significant body of works he’s made over the years.
Those with greater empathy for the flesh than the spirit should still visit the exhibit. As an artist, Mons has never been caged in by themes. The “Bulahan” works rub raw my preconceptions of spirituality.
His “Belen” is a block of bayong carved to show the dominant visage of St. Joseph and the smaller image of the Virgin Mary, cupping a Niño, a reversal of roles in all the stories of the manger birth I’ve heard.
In “Sta. Maria Asuncion,” reportedly a 400-year-old found piece of molave illustrating the Assumption, the faces and the feet of the angel and Mary are distended in rapture I immediately associate with the sexual, having had no experience of the spiritual variety.
More curious is the story behind Mons’ “Bulahan ang Bunga sa Tiyan Mo,” which shows magkuno inlays portraying the face, hands and feet of Mary, set off against the molave body. It is not only the starkness of dark wood against white that startles. It is the realization that one is looking at an image of the pregnant Mary, an oddity in traditional iconography that shows Mary at the Annunciation, fast forward to Mary in the Manger, skipping other allusions of the flesh.
According to Mons, discussions over a possible commissioned work on Mary fell through. That same night, he dreamed of a woman sitting on a log, who then looks back at him and says, “I have for you a gift.” Waking up, he dismisses it as a “diabetic” dream.
On the same day, his brother, Londong, tells him about finding a molave trunk abandoned near their ancestral home in Dumanjug. It takes Mons another two years to finish the carving of Mary, which he later gives to the Congregation of St. John. While the sculpture was in progress, his younger son, Elias, often kissed the molave bump, a natural formation of the wood that inspires the “Bulahan” theme.
In “Timon,” a molave trunk carved to show a fisherman steering in a storm, I find a clue to Mons’ view of the religious shaping a life. What I mistook at first for a devil lashed by the storms of faith into covering his face is a mere mortal whose enormous feet express the tremendous effort of will and sinew to steer on course.
Faith is not passive acceptance. It is recognizing the anomalous, even doubt, to prove the existence of faith. Very much as a grain of sand brings back in a rush a whole interlude.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Jan. 1, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column
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