Young Art' update: Stella Rojas: The Merchant of Venus
Young Art' update:
Stella Rojas: The Merchant of Venus
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, November 30, 1988
MID-AFTERNOON in an eternity of mid-afternoon. Tense torsos knife into the chlorinated pool like jackhammer projectiles thrust into limpid, Freudian dreams. With a little imagination, the scene explodes into a third dimension; the spray catches you in the face like a tease; above the waterline is the scent of cascara, peach blossoms and cinnamon, suspended in the balm of sun-tan oils and tall glasses of Lipton tea, bouyant in the leisurely ooze like a second skin that molds into crevices and curdles on the tongue.
In fact, Stella Rojas' enormous oil painting-cum-mural entitled "The Bathers," on view at the CCP's latest hallway venue until mid-January, appears at first glance to be about people, but is actually about glare. The menacing, unholy glare glazes every surface, bouncing off optical lenses and bared teeth, nailpolish and irradiated flesh, cleavages, matronly paunches, rippled fat and muscle, elastic swimsuits and rubberized deck-chairs, elbows and knees, perhaps a cleverly-implanted glass eye and the filtered, sweltering tropical steam. Then, too, the glare permeates the visible even as it outlines the invisible-like infrared tracers: the soft life, carcinogens, poliomyelitis and bareknuckle seduction lurk in the silent undertow of shapes and sizes soaking up the sun and the passing hours like layered gauze. A somnambulist's delight? Or a moralist's nightmare?
Rojas, another exceedingly young UP prodigy given to large-scale bravado, is better known to this critic as an ardent student of the voluptuous, a terse technician of the paintbrush and palette who is perhaps the only living Filipino painter who can still manage to arouse with the nude. That may be somewhat of an embarrassment for a frail, willowy sapling like Rojas, but is no small distinction in itself.
"The Bathers," succeeds precisely because of Rojas' proven proficiency with the sensual image, the veiled innuendo caught in the cross-weave of almost-tangible light and shadow. True, we need another yankee-doodle photorealist like a hole in the head, but Stella Rojas' developing mastery of means (and hopefully, of proportion as well) is convincing enough, if slightly neurotic case for willfully undergoing cranium surgery. Count the tiles in the poolside mosaic and see if that isn't perverse enough for even the hard-to-please. And smart money tells us that inherent talent laced with the conviction of the manic is a potent brew. Parched skin, raised eyebrows and all.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Young Art' update: Stella Rojas: The Merchant of Venus” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, November 30, 1988
