Epicly Later’d – Ray Barbee
by VBS_tv

The works, composed of paintings in acrylic and sculptures incarnated from Cordero’s past paintings and a myriad ballpoint-pen drawing studies bear images of guts, innards and brains spilling out in fluorescent hues of pink and ochre meatiness – even the clouds in a painting with a mermaid belie its wispiness in its solid delineation of puffiness. Any aspiration for divine sublimity is instantly grounded to b-movie pulp. Yet however clichéd the plot lines these movies take, the integral that binds them is the attempt at a moral or a simplistic lesson in causal consequences of an accident of nature or a lapse in judgment however minor that is. Mystics do seem to follow the same path of causal logic in deciphering their coded imagery in foretelling almost always an apocalyptic future, in apoplectic rapture they speak from the “beyond” as though embodying the vision itself.

Beyond the canvas however, there is only mounting banality encountered in the mass media and its byproducts consumed unwittingly by its very makers, an institutionalized anthropophagy of the vicarious essence of the represented. This by far is what fuels most body-slasher-horror flicks, i.e. “demons” preying upon clueless virgins to act as host and dummy for their murderous schemes or deranged recluses hacking hitchhikers for their skin, and thereafter their used bodies disposed of in an Ab-Ex bloodbath.

With their reproducibility, images have also become inured in their disposability. Pictures have become pictures of other pictures. The canvas, more than ever, willfully plays host to these multiple transmogrification. The skill however, in copying and transferring these images onto the canvas can be learned without innate genius, and especially if the goal is pedagogic propaganda. Pictures in this way, like horror flicks or any film for that matter lose their immediate hold of wonder. Dissected in many ways by theories and turned on its head by their self-consciousness, they become stale bad jokes for the senile. For Cordero, they just become boring academic art. He tries to achieve flatness in his paintings not from the art historical precedent of a Greenberg modernism, but from the perspective of a billboard painter or a jeepney sticker artist. His very symmetrical composition is not so much derived from a mindful memorization of the laws of balance but rather from mimicking the sincere attempts to perfection by self-taught artisans. This deskilling process for Cordero is his way of recapturing the wonder that once set him also to paint and make pictures which has become lost to him ironically in school. This is best exemplified in one work entitled The Individual (The Flock of Wrongs), where a kneeling figure in white oxfords is praying to a giant idol reminiscent of Alex Gray’s visionary 2D plastinated humans/new agers in yoga trance.

Behind this figure with exposed anatomy is a row of paintings copied from the website The Museum of Bad Art. Rizalista symbols add to the surfeit of esoteric popism via the Masonic pyramid and the brown-robed priestess.

Art begins with the spectacular or so what Cordero wants to effect in his works. The spilled brains may have been his simplistic illustration for leaving out the thinking and just be zombies for a moment. Or is it rather that the brains are what has become of art –
an overfed mutant itching to break out of its host to feed on another? Or is this the nightmare of dead reckoning the practice of painting in a perennially disaffected host?

“Oh your collegiate grief has left you dowdy in sweatshirts/ Absolute horror!” ( Vampire Weekend)

In the show, Yu shares over a hundred photographs of random scapes and objects, shot in spaces inhabited by her contemporaries from the Philippine art scene: areas where the artistic and utilitarian, personal and professional, merge and create an interface.

Out of these visual investigations, Yu produces photographs of accidental sculptures or still lifes, perceiving uniqueness in the nondescript, intention in the incidental. Yu limits her interventions in the compositions to framing; she chances upon the scenes as they are in artist’s studios and homes, documenting what she sees at random, selecting frames based on visual impact and interest. She engages in a form of documentation that privileges intuition, aesthetics, and randomness.

Yu also includes in the show several actual objects, their ambiguous presence perhaps alluding to how subjects simultaneously become objects on display, and demonstrating the process of borrowing as a means of documenting presence.

Yu’s photographs also seamlessly pose the question of how the boundaries between art and “non-art” may not be so delineated after all. The artists implicitly represented in Yu’s photographs are noted for their diverse contributions to the advancement of Philippine contemporary art, yet none of their names are literally denoted or alluded to in the carefully composed and vivid images of spontaneous and generally anonymous settings, except for a few context clues related to their works. Yu intentionally puts less focus on artworks that hang on the gallery walls and focuses her lens on objects and spaces related to processes or activities prior to exhibitions or the production of actual works: desks, rooms, tables, exercise balls, tools, raw paint, the work wrapped up or in a state of completion.

In choosing inhabited spaces, personal effects, and artworks as subject of her photographs, Yu casts a new aspect to the act of documenting contemporary art practice.
-lisa ito

Spinoza once said that God is nature and nature is God and that everything that exists can be reduced to a single reality. This line of thinking is not far from the Zen Buddhist concept of 10,000 Things, which denotes the sum of all essences and the dynamic interconnection, simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe. This spiritual distillation in philosophy is similar to abstraction and its transmutative effect. Through authentic non-objectivity, we are distanced from worldly distractions and achieve a sense of higher self.

Having previously done works that elaborate on the ideas of Mondrian, Malevich, and more recently, Newman and Rodchenko, Chabet is well aware of the advancements of their intellectual explorations in geometric abstraction and primary colors. His response expands the field by way of re-configuration and repetition, on an architectural scale. Like other abstractionists, Chabet works with anonymous surfaces, applied with pure, flat color; any trace of the painter’s hand is effaced. However, unlike others, particularly some Minimal artists who eschew any reference to the outside world, Chabet infuses his works with familiar, everyday objects. In this case, clipboards to signify inventory, notation and order.

While the work is assertively stark, it is far from empty. Abstraction, for Chabet, is not a clean break from the natural world but a process by which the self comes to know its differentiated yet immanent wholeness, which in turn, can only be glimpsed by realization of the self’s complicated universality and mutuality of opposing forces. Such an art, like religion, as Mondrian explained, is one with life and at the same time transcends it.

Given his background in architecture, Chabet is concerned with the properties of space and of the objects in it. An installation can be seen as an exercise in classical geometry. The mathematical precision in the ‘all-over’ manner by which Chabet installs his painted panels and clipboards reveal a more sophisticated intelligence. Mathematical truths rendered in visual terms suggest discipline and control of the self as well as systematic reflection on it and demonstrate a belief in the timeless truth, which is vital to our existence and transformation.

One does not look at Chabet’s paintings; one has to enter the entire work. And to experience the work is to turn inward and to see it as a structure of both personal and primordial signs whose seeming discord actually foretells its unity. Drawing from the most elementary of form and color, he leads us to an eternal vision of art, one that does not aim to represent the universe, but one that makes space for the universe within.

“To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by the 10,000 things.”
- Dogen

Ringo Bunoan

Six of the large scale drawings, combine Louie Cordero’s obsessive horror vacui rendering and aggressive coloring and Mariano Ching’s spare use of space and finely detailed drawings to produce an eclectic yet cohesive and dynamic pairing of styles.

Death Scream may sound like a bizarre heavy metal shriek at the world with its depiction of a world gone mad. Much as the works are strange and baffling, or even dreadful and gory, in the end, it’s about two guys having fun with drawing and painting. Quoting Black from the Pixies, “There is no point… the point is to experience it, to enjoy it, to be entertained by it.”

mariano ching
louie cordero
blanc

More than ever, this earth is mapped by images of itself, of its whole and of its infinite parts. From within and beyond the bounds of its heavens, a camera is propped to document itself, an ubiquitous eye on its people, its landscapes, its skies, its objects, its creatures; a self-awareness made more apparent by the multiplicity of its pictures, an awareness motivated by its fear of its own utter annihilation.

Life Magazine thrived on such goal to offer its readers an omnibus of such images, but with a blithe eye for their certain brand of photo-journalism, as their manifesto used to attest – “We wish to have some fun in this paper… We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world… We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station�”. This all the more makes them perfect fodder for Jayson Oliveria’s visual puns and oblique maneuvers that betwixt meaning and metaphor into a crushing punch line, devious and obvious at the same time. This as to be gleaned from his latest exhibit entitled Life Expectancies opening at Mag:net Katipunan on the 7th of March.

These scavenged images, Googled once again and printed directly on primed canvas, are minimally intervened by Oliveria by combing over, smearing, dabbing paint on the pictures’ edges or on some of its parts; in others an outline image of a bawdy reversible cartoon is drawn over with various colored pigments. He terms these interventions as enhancements, something devised as not to detract from what the picture is, but to amplify rather their generic iconicity, centered and underscored by the white margins or “leave-outs” around them. This as seen in one of the images where Oliveria scattered more dots on a picture of a man holding a bored through baseball bat; or in another where the debris of an explosion is multiplied and flicked on to the edge of the canvas which has been roughly stained by a rather appalling magenta.

There is the over-all datedness in the images that Oliveria used, being mostly culled from an age that has just come out of the ruins of past world wars and embracing all the novelty of an idealized life jumpstarted by a renewed and accelerated industrialization. These pictures act like pictograms in typifying what they represent – as a piece of ham bone would look like, as a sliced loaf of bread with jam would look like, or a bobbysoxer’s shoes would look like, or even a horribly decaying teeth would look like – didactic, common, nonspecific, almost utilitarian as an assembly line item – all rather appealing qualities for its very dissection and further manipulation for Oliveria. The logo of Life magazine, intact and conspicuous at the bottom of each image however stresses the incongruity of the image with what the trademark name would usually imply, connote or denote.

Oliveria’s manipulations of such images are seeming extensions of the shelf-life of these images whose near obsolescence marks both their datedness and clinical generalness. Art’s intrusion beholds them longer for scrutiny and further evaluation. But does such an attempt foil or rather affirm the verity of the adage Ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short)? But for how long is the art good for when art itself is and experienced as a picture imaged from among the dozen images available anywhere now?

(This as exemplified by a towering spindly network of surveillance cameras crafted from cardboard cylinders and milk cartons, a proxy prop or decoy for the actual thing. )

If pictures are to be deemed as approximations of actual things, and if art serves that same function when it exists as an actual thing by itself, do these corollaries chew on each other’s premise and proceed to make muck off them by their infinite referencing?

It might be reassuring to be reminded from time to time that the base of the world has edges after all for the other stuff that tire of being beholden to fall off from and to let life run off the frame.

magnet katipunan
Jayson Oliveria

Photos by MM

via BUILDING43