Robles at the CCP New-age Pandora
Robles at the CCP
New-age Pandora
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, September 23, 1987
FOR his thoroughly intriguing mixed media installation "The Box," 31-year-old artist Roberto Robles has built a formidable apartment-like structure into the CCP's Small Gallery, and has peopled each cubicle with the demons of art. Robles' paintings, drawings, illustrated manuscripts, makeshift plateglass composites and sculpture, dating back to 1982, literally line the walls and spaces of this enclosure, an outpouring of personal produce that stands as testimony to his hyper-productivity.
One arrives through a narrow, central corridor where a louvered door witft a peek-a-boo window opens up to the silent holocaust within. First impressions on entering include: (a) a recording studio very late at night, with the session musicians having all gone home or having fallen asleep on their instruments; (b) a pirate radio station off the air, with the records hung up to dry; (c) a whitewashed dormitory for Boy Scouts, possibly in Teachers' Camp, Baguio; (d) the inside of a burned-out ham radio.
In fact, so potentially audal is Robles' environment that the absence of sound immediately perplexes the viewer.
Robles is careful not to plot a course for us to follow, preferring to encourage our wandering instincts through this tight and arrid hall of mirrors. On one end is a residenital chamber, and in it, a spread of beddings marked by the outline of a figure not quite at rest, a sno-paked electric fan suspended in mid-air, and a scattering of small religious artifacts like talismans against bangungot and the toothfairy.
Another chamber centers on a levitating chair, and still another on a flight of pseudo-stairs that lead nowhere. This is not exactly original imagery, and it is to the artist's credit that he manages to interrelate his incidental arrangements with his own intensely personal renderings on the walls -- much like a visual fugue of vibrant shapes and textures both real and conjured.
The exhibit's one small failing, I think, has something to do with Robles' literary aspirations, and with his penchant for labelling and text. The artist's obsessive determination to write is clearly beyond his current capability to do so with intelligence and wit, and Robles' own limited facility with language has him copying phrases at random from out of esoteric reading matter, composing clumsy ditties in delirious penciled tantrums, and repeating key words like "Plaridel" and "kahon" to the point where it is very nearly embarrassing.
Still and all, "The Box" is undoubtedly a landmark exhibit that comes both from a most unexpected source and at a most unexpected point in time, establishing the youthful Robles as a major new talent that bears close watching from hereon. More than just a postscript to the installational genre, it provides this obviously still-fertile ground with a second lease on life beyond the tired ramblings of the ageing avant-garde.
* * *
Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Robles at the CCP New-age Pandora” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, September 23, 1987
