4 BY SYJUCO - Part 2
4 BY SYJUCO - Part 2
by Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: San Juan [The Liberated Bimonthly Magazine of Art], October 1986
THE JOY & PERILS OF IMMOBILITY
ROMULO OLAZO 10th ONE-MAN EXHIBITION AT THE LUZ GALLERY, MAKATI
"Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained" could well be the title of Romulo Olazo's latest exhibition of his recent work at the Luz Gallery in Makati. To be sure, Olazo has painted these same configurations again and again like some sort of calisthenic zen, unmindful of the changing world around him. This tireless reworking of subliminal form and color truly approaches a ritualistic indefatigability that must be honed on unwavering faith, if not entirely made in heaven, lest the art and the artist both have succumbed to malnutrition long before now. For Olazo persists, and on occasion, still continues to delight. And this in itself is incredible, even as the magic wears thin.
Olazo is celebrated in more than one artistic camp as a contemporary master, and in many others as an artist on the threshold of mastery. Indeed, Olazo is a master of the variation. It is no small task to juggle about an austere vocabulary of gestural and figurative bravado and make it almost always settle into "different" pictures. Olazo appears to go on and on indefinitely, and with hardly an effort. But then again, is this really all that difficult once you've mastered the ins and outs to a language of your own invention? Is not every signature on your checkbook a little different from the one that came before it? Are signatures art?
Undoubtedly, some artists have beautiful signatures. Their patrons see only their signatures, and never their pictures. How richly these artists and their patrons deserve one another!
As for Romulo Olazo, some questions inevitably come to mind. Will this artist bravely defy his exceptional mastery of means and thereby transcend the precarious status of a young master? Will he fall prey to the signature game as others have done before him? Will his language go the way of Latin and its swinely versions?
There are masters who court time and masters who court danger. What a wonderfully exciting artist Olazo would be if he would only court danger.
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LAST TANGO IN MANOBO LAND
"GODDESS OF THE SOUTH & OTHER PAINTED DREAMS"
FIL DELACRUZ AT THE CCP SMALL GALLERY
Much of art in this country is very much like Monopoly. An artist in search of his own identity must venture just far enough to uncover an area of concern previously ignored or neglected, and with adequate fencing materials at his disposal, can be expected to spend the remainder of his life staking his claim on his intellectual property. While some artists build their homesteads on folk rituals and stone facades, others furiously attempt to copyright persecution and angst, fanciful distortion and novel painting techniques, strange new media and even imaginative framing. But Monopoly is at best a fascinating board game, plotting strategy at the roll of the dice.
For the past few years, the artist Fil Delacruz has held the deeds of ownership to both the ethnic minority as subject, as well as to an archaic graphic medium known as the mezzotint. Delacruz has been twice awarded the AAP Grand Prize for Printmaking, and is therefore as distinguished a printmaker as they come. But whereas his montaged composites of highland tribesmen have for some time reached the point of dreariness, and have lately been reduced to mere iconographic elements flung about for their compositional attributes and pictorial appeal, his literally painstaking rock-and-grind method of printmaking has continued to give his growing audience aesthetic delight in its dramatic velveteen clarity.
In this latest outing at the Small Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Delacruz has abandoned the mezzotint for painting, but has elected to retain his highland tribesmen as his subjective point of reference. This is tragic either way. While Dela Cruz shows himself to be an accomplished painter, he is not (yet?) an outstanding one. In contrast, his prowess as a major exponent of the mezzotint is very nearly legendary; and his reputation as a leading Filipino printmaker is well deserved. While the artist should be complimented for this significant attempt at breaking out of his previous mold, Delacruz might have done better to have reversed his priorities, at least for the time-being.
Once motivated by his genuine compassion for the plight of the ethnic Manobos, Delacruz now appears to be more concerned with his Freudian meanderings into the nocturnal pre-occupations of tribal prototypes. Feathers (symbolizing titillation and desire) and bouyant egg-forms (symbolizing fertility and virility in turn) literally taunt the twilight voyeuristic, and there is no more dignity here than in a public recounting of the sexual fantasies of midgets. What was probably a sincere effort at humanizing the ethnic minority has sadly backfired, largely because of the artist's torrid romanticizing of a subject that he has long exhausted.
For Fil Delacruz, unsinkable young artist that he is, the need for other alternatives is glaringly apparent — though never far from attainable. He will be back with a vengeance. And you can bet your utilities on that.
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DICK DAROY & THE SMURFS
"VIEWING THE NUMINUS"
Roderico Jose Daroy At The CCP MUSEUM HALLWAY
Some artists are underrated by virtue of circumstance. Roderico Jose Daroy almost deserves it.
Daroy's work in recent years can only be described as lacklustre, slow and self-consciously plodding, often pleading intellectuality as an alibi for its persistent dreariness. If a work had airs, Roderico Jose's recent produce can be said to be full of it. There is nothing to celebrate and hardly anything worth sneezing it. There is only the art of Dick Daroy.
For instance, termites and the weather have always made strange bedfellows. Left to their own devices, they can literally eat you out of house and home. But Daroy courts this pestilence and feeds it with every conceivable kind of biodegradable rubbish. And quite suddenly, it's a sight to behold! — all crumbly and weatherbeaten, so giggly-surreal in its varied chance configurations, so delicately and unmistakably rotten. It is typically Oscar the Grouch to heap garbage on us and lace it with philosophical ramblings-on. And artist Daroy plays this role to the hilt.
The joke and Daroy's weathered works both turn sour after you've seen enough refuse coming through. The termites are not always as cooperative as they should be, or perhaps aren't eating as much as Daroy has to produce. Also, it only rains on five months of every year. As a result, there are less and less of the giggly-surreal configurations, and only the rot remains. The miracle of creation is supposed to take place when the garbage becomes art, but lately, not all of Daroy's magical rubbish gets to make it across the threshold. And so we have all this untransformed trash smiling down on us from the gallery walls, unabashedly masquerading as art.
In "VIEWING THE NUMINUS", Daroy's literally expansive exhibition at the CCP Museum Hallway, the artist grants us merciful (if temporary) reprieve from other people's wastebaskets. Instead, Daroy presents us with an unusually long drawing on paper which very nearly covers the entire length of his venue. The vista is sprawlingly earthbound, featuring crabgrass, mushrooms, snails, and other common undergrowth. But the expansiveness ends there.
If this view of the numinus seems more than vaguely familiar, it is precisely because it is not uncommon. As we have already said, very little ever happens in Daroy's work of late, and this oversized pencil-sketch is by no means an exception. A length of rustic elfin undergrowth on an appropriate length of paper is all we are left to content with in this case. And it isn't even pretty.
The intellect be damned! Hardly anyone has the patience for this kind of pussyfooting anymore — not with so much else going on. And really now, enough is enough.
If anything, Daroy's latest exhibition at the CCP Museum Hallways echoes the dying strains of a dessicated artform that now plays only with itself. "The times they are a-changin'" said Dylan rather appropriately for the stragglers of this world. And someone had better tell Dick Daroy, if gently.
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CHILDREN OF DARKNESS AND THE DAWN
"Primary Deviance"
Chito Valenzuela New Panguin Gallery, Malate
Chito Valenzuela's first exhibition at the old Penguin Gallery on Adriatico Street featured exploding heads and other disturbing drawings that were decidedly sci-fi in approach, but also wickedly erotic through an implied poetic mutation. To put it simply, it was weird and very nearly distasteful work. Valenzuela's series of SX-70 Polaroid snapshots, exhibited at the CCP Small Gallery a few months later, were equally upsetting and even more implicitly fetishistic, portraying a motley assortment of Bulwagang Gantimpala types crammed into an elevator and biting furiously at each other's feet. Valenzuela also released a collection of competent videos, shown earlier this year at the usual underground places, and which clearly indicated his determination to pursue this vision of dogged decadence.
In "PRIMARY DEVIANCE", his latest outing at the new Penguin Gallery on Remedios Circle, Chito Valenzuela firmly establishes himself as one provocative heir-apparent to the recent rash of bizarre and irreverent art that even now threatens to dominate much of our current artistic produce. Indeed, he seems unusually well-endowed in an era of fast moves and benign cynicism. Born into a creative climate enthralled by the regenerated lure of transmedia, Valenzuela is an exciting young visual artist, an emerging proponent of the New Photography, as well as a stage actor and set designer of some experience. He avidly writes poetry, dabbles in a wide range of audal concerns both musical and otherwise, and makes little distinction between one artform and the next. But even more importantly, his references are obviously new wave, and at 22 years of age, Valenzuela displays enormous potential beyond the immediate influence of the old avant-garde.
His is an art deliberately excessive and aggressively unnerving, sometimes fancied in the manner of true poetic justice as the artist's revenge on his environment. Certainly, there is nothing more indicative of a dark age in a people's history than for its artists to consistently produce frightfully disturbing works on truthful impulse. European Dada descended explosively at the heels of the First World War, just as the stormclouds had begun darkening over that continent. And much of American Art had bordered on outright psychosis during the years in which that nation was rocked and repeatedly humiliated by its unfortunate involvement in foreign wars of attrition. For ideally, the artist is the mirror-image of his time, and most exultant work produced in darkness is either a fabrication or a lie. The unsettling art of Chito Valenzuela is neither.
Molded plastic insects on densely-infested flypaper, rubber nursing nipples peering out from beneath acetate diagrams of the human brain, organic mutants and renderings of virtual humanoids in the sublimely-gestural act of relieving themselves — all these may not be the usual tools of the trade. But we do live in a rather unusual time. And a new generation of creative onlookers like Chito Valenzuela paints pictures of the darkness in our midst and cajoles the dawn into an early rising.
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THREE POEMS FOR VITALIS
By Cesare
ONE
Prefect. Diviner. Omnibright.
there is beauty in all objects.
there is color in the wine.
Divine, divide, distill
all perspective into form.
all white into blank and white.
all death into eternities
of life and death and life eternal.
Diviner, Omnibright. Perfect-tense.
are not all labyrinths to be bridged?
all peaks to be scaled or blasted?
all wars to be won or lost and won or lost again?
all gods blasphemed?
Divide, distill, denounce
everything that is not everything
and nothing at once. and everything at best.
Omnibright, Perfect-tense, King of kings,
there is danger in all objects!
there is poison in the wine!
TWO
I am captive of this room and this time.
I am the shape of all objects.
I am the color in the wine.
I am swell and ebb of tide and howling gale
in pictures for the blind.
I am pretender to the light.
I am pretender to the vast.
I am pretender to the battle
of edifice and dust.
THREE
Doggedly the man
remains the man
shorn of vestments
short of breath
limping like a dog
steadfast as the wind
- Manila, August 1986
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “4 By Syjuco - Part 2” (page 1 of 2), San Juan The Liberated Bimonthly Magazine of Art, October 1986
Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “4 By Syjuco - Part 2” (page 2 of 2), San Juan The Liberated Bimonthly Magazine of Art, October 1986
