Children of Darkness and the Dawn
Children of Darkness and the Dawn
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, September 10, 1986
CHITO Valenzuela's first exhibition at the old Penguin Gallery on Adriatico Street featured exploding heads and other disturbing drawings decidedly sci-fi in approach, but also wickedly sexual 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 explicitly 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 selection 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 has arrived 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 an artistic climate characterized by the regenerated lure of transmedia and its polymorphous manifestations, 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 audial concerns both musical and otherwise, and makes little or no distinction between one artform and the next. But even more importantly, his inclination is obviously new wave, and at 22 years of age, Valenzuela displays considerable 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 nation’s history than for its artists to consistently produce frightfully disturbing works on truthful impulse. European Dada descended explosively in anticipation of the Second World War, just as the stormclouds were darkening irreversibly over the continent. Likewise, much of American Art bordered on outright psychosis during the turbulent years in which that nation was rocked — and later humiliated — by its unfortunate entanglement in foreign wars of attrition. For ideally, the artist is the mirror-image of his time, and a great deal of exultant work produced in darkness is either a fabrication or a lie.
The unsettling art of Chito Valenzuela is neither.
Molded plastic insects or densely-infested flypaper, rubber nipples peering out from beneath acetate pictures, organic mutants and unusual renderings of speakeasy habitues in the act of urination — all these may not be the usual tools of the trade. But we live in a most 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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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Children of Darkness and the Dawn” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, September 10, 1986
