Please Sit on The Sculpture, But Don’t Eat The Chairs
Please Sit on The Sculpture, But Don’t Eat The Chairs
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: Philippine Daily Globe, October 13, 1990
THERE seems to be a conspiracy in the post-Marcosian art world, and it is poised to raise the creation of imaginative crafts, furniture and functional accessories to a legitimate and exciting new artform. The evidence is clear; it’s everywhere.
Imelda Pilapil and Rey Paz Contreras continue to churn out techno-industrial and quasi-ethnic designs, like inspired hat tricks, manufacturing pieces in virtually rapid succession. Painter Roberto Feleo and his wife Cecile recently opened at the Hiraya Gallery in Ermita an exhibition of quilted bedcovers, the latest folk-derived produce of Comite de Festejos, their own arts-and-crafts label.
Abstractionist Charito Bitanga creates delicate terracota earrings, broaches and pendants in signed, limited editions. Ida Bugayong makes hand-tooled leather handbags. Tata Montilla’s Kamibonggo and Ige Ramos’s Tomato Graphics fashion deliciously quaint cards, pads and stationery on 100 percent recycled paper.
Maniya’s kid brother Gabriel Barredo, a multi-awarded sculptor with a fetish for detail, has made a tidy sum of money by “jazzing up Lewis”. Aca Verzosa paints t-shirts with fierce, flourescent colors. And Kasibulan, a high-profile feminist front spearheaded by rabid libbers, just concluded a rank-and-file exhibit of contemporary weavings at the CCP.
In Los Banos, Laguna, forest-dwelling sculptor Junyee assembles ingenious home furnishings from organic debris like roots, bark and branches. Expressionist painter Jaime de Guzman and his wife Anne still spin clay pots somewhere in Candelaria, Quezon. Further south in Bacolod City, US-trained artists Felix Hagad and Catherine Sicango-Hagad maintain a contemporary crafts center called Art Energy, a veritable launching pad for original world-class furniture and fixtures.
Old dogs do learn new tricks. Art guru Arturo Luz, long an arbiter of fine taste among the idlerich, persists in rehashing elegant antique jewelry. Printmaker and scholar Dr. Rod Paras Perez recently showcased his radical palayok designs executed by rural craftsmen. Jose Joya has been known for years to paint on ceramic plates and pottery. And national sculptor Napoleon Abueva has been generously praised for his monolithic functional pieces spring-loaded with Pinoy witticisms.
This budding renaissance in functional art provides the busy backdrop for the delightfully allegorical Art Furniture of painter Claude Tayag, on view at the Ayala Museum in Makati until Sunday. Purposeful pieces that are at once hideously hefty, they attempt acrobatic contortions, like performing elephants on rollerskates, in flagrant defiance of gravity and grace.
Tayag is best known as an impressionist, as a diarist and a traveler, as a watercolorist with a yen for history and geography, as a chef, and as an aspiring muralist who wields a mop instead of brushes. Above all, he is an inveterate showman, whose large new pieces are appropriately showy. An artist who has been outrageously and wonderfully inconsistent, his designs are as quirky as his track record. At their worst, they are decidedly bad—neo-Bauhaus leviathans with the hi-gloss laquered finish of wood veneer at its tackiest. That we condone this at all is a testament to Tayag’s winning and infectious humor, his ongoing madcap parody of classical/modern, his stirring if naive bravado, and his exceedingly creative use of satirical hype.
Tayag is not so much a sculptor as he is a conquistador with an energetic pencil. An inexhaustible reserve of conviction and self-confidence—almost pontifical—motivates and propels him. So even while his sense of design is mediocre, his sculptural grasp small, and his furniture hopelessly locked in a monotonous symmetry of wave-like dips and bumps, this artist appeases our demands for virtuosity by heralding a new plasticity for wood. In art, courage has its rewards!
As a matter of fact, Tayag’s recliners, benches and chairs are as uncomfortable as they look. The test of seating is always in the sitting, and his Pretender To The Throne is an implement of torture. A bolt-upright chair with a corrugated backrest that’s as wicked as they come, the piece has about as...
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Please Sit on The Sculpture, But Don’t Eat The Chairs” (page 1 of 1), Philippine Daily Globe, October 13, 1990
