Transplanted Pictorial Harmonies
Transplanted Pictorial Harmonies
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, April 01, 1987
THE stillborn ambivalence in the art of Jun Domingo has always been both its most dangerous obstacle and its most exhilarating triumph. In his current one-man-exhibit at the Finale Art File in Makati, the artist resolves this apparent conflict with newfound finesse and unprecedented decisiveness, trading his characteristic boldness for greater clarity of purpose.
Working primarily with the much-abused hi-tech process of image transferal, Domingo lifts pictures from the printed pages of books and magazines, snatching them from their original context with the aid of liquid solvents and transplanting them in reverse onto his lushly painted surfaces. The process itself has been increasingly in wider use, is therefore commonplace enough, and is all the more demanding because of this.
A young virtuoso of the subliminal specializing in the veiled vernacular of mutated symbolism, Domingo has worked for years from this bottomless source of readymade material, tapping the diverse communicational potential of open-ended imagery. The “hunter” in Jun Domingo — by all accounts a voracious peruser of rare editions and mass-based periodicals — is surpassed only by his inherent talent as a “pictorial linguist”, a gifted diviner of the inner nuances of imagistic sleights and slants, a matchmaker in the volatile marriage of disparate pictures and their interaction in chance mutations.
It is important to point out that Domingo’s obvious debt to the selective scavenging of Pop Art has long been paid in full. The accrued interest he has offered up with persistent diligence is to have infused his paintings with a “readability” akin to the printed page from which its main components are derived. And here lies still another seemingly-irreconcilable aspect of Jun Domingo’s art — that of its origins in readily-available publicational sources, and its consequent internalizing into a deeply personal language of its own.
Within this context, Domingo is not so much a gatherer of cultural debris as he is a cryptographer working through an abstracted photo-derived realism. His transplanted pictorial signposts are strung together like words in a sentence, stripped of their original implications, and rendered maleable enough to readily participate in a virtual exchange of sequential monologues. These pictures in their original state are much like stock-in-trade musical notes or canned paint in Domingo’s working procedure, having no tangible significance of their own, and given new life in a recreated order of syncopations, harmonies, tonalities, volumes, inundations, and articulated syntax. Truly, “visual poetics” and “visual harmonics” characterize much of Jun Domingo’s most compelling works. Every component detail is deliberately neutralized in its gathering, and then fastidiously cast in a complex structure later to be read as an integrated whole.
It seems ironic that Jun Domingo, an avowed painter by choice, should figure so prominently in recent exhibitions attempting to define the broadening span of the New Photography. This award-winning artist literally paints with pictures — not with the camera, but with its recycled by-products. It is this very obliteration of conventional distinctions that renders the work of artists like Domingo of special interest to advocates of feuding disciplines simultaneously. And that, in itself, is some indication of the breaking of new ground.
Jun Domingo’s rapidly-maturing art — produced virtually in self-imposed exile from our ragtag artistic mainstream — might appear at first glance to be aloof, uncommitted, and deceptively simplistic. There is very little of the rhetoric here that we have come to expect from “thinking artists” like him. But then again, the best of the visual arts is better seen and not heard.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Transplanted Pictorial Harmonies” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, April 01, 1987
