Young Art x 2: Growing Up Gifted
Young Art x 2: Growing Up Gifted
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, January 24, 1987
YOUTH has always been passionately at odds with itself. And the rites of passage into adulthood comprise far more than a second birthling. A coming into one's own by violent means necessitates the murder of innocent ideals in its wake. The Ace courts his first kill with savage tenderness, savoring life and death by his own hand, eager and yet painfully reluctant, driven by vanity and choked by remorse.
By romantic tradition, the artist at the threshold of maturity is no different. Like the man of God, he lies prostrate before his peers, quietly submissive even as he calls out to be heard.
In what is obviously an attempt to defy chicken-hearted convention, a well-rehearsed game plan of "rabbit-punching in the clinches" characterizes the first one-man show by the occasional artist Nilo Ilarde at the Ayala Museum's Gallery III. It is a debut that has been long in coming. While he can hardly be called well-established, Ilarde is no stranger to the local artworld, being for years a veteran campaigner in his own right while maintaining an attitude of passive belligerence as a creative agnostic of sorts. Widely identified with his longtime mentor Roberto Chabet, the younger Ilarde has inherited not a few of his teacher's behavioral quirks in the gallery by virtue of their symbiotic relationship.
For one thing, both artists seem to revel in the dictum that good manners do not a good artist make. This, his first solo outing, serves to further emphasize the antagonistic stance with which Ilarde confronts both his artmaking and his audience, obviously convinced that hostility is somehow synonymous with intellectuality. It is true that The James Dean Syndrome lies at the heart of new wave phenomenology, but it is incomprehensible that anyone so revolted by an audience-at-large should choose to exhibit at all. Clearly, Ilarde is one conscientious objector with his eye on the kitty, hoping to have his cake and eat it too.
The artist's exhibit; small flared rectangles of pre-perforated fiberboard that are of no significant value, numbering 365 pieces by his own account (one for each day of the year), and arbitrarily installed in virtual edge-to-edge fashion around the perimeter of the gallery. Hanging well above eye-level and practically devoid of character and coloration, they leave one with the impression of standing in an empty exhibition hall between shows. In fact, Ilarde attempts to cajole our unenlightened sensibilities with this juvenile interplay of fullness and emptiness at one and the same time, assaulting us with a simplistic structure of outdated paradoxes surrounding his exhibition twice-removed. The concept is sound enough, if not entirely unique, and may have fared much better at the hands of a more sensitive and resourceful talent. As it is, however, there is far too little of the artist's own worth invested: ergo, little more than a hand-me-down concept to contend with.
The outcome, of course, is truly unfortunate. Ilarde's debut easily ranks among the most regrettable shows in recent memory, if in fact it could qualify as one. His determination to exhibit and not to exhibit simultaneously can only be interpreted as a deliberate smokescreen for his growing inability to measure up to size. It is conceivable that he may have finally over-intellectualized his art to an early demise, which is tragic for anyone of even limited potential. Given his track record, this artist was once capable of at least a little more. As they say, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Cerebral artist or escape artist, even this germ of an idea has proved to be a great deal more than Nilo Ilarde can handle.
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There was this little-known sci-fi movie in the 50s that had the world suddenly overrun by kids. The current group show by "ANG", at the Pinaglabanan Galleries in San Juan, is that bit of phantasmagoria realized – for better or for worse.
Pinaglabanan plays talentscout on the one hand, and day-care center for artistic toddlers on the other, serving up good and bad in the same heaping spoonful. The exhibition is obviously more concerned with potential than with significance, featuring hitherto-unheralded works by upcoming artists Pablo Biglang-Awa, John Cinco, Henry Frejas, Jerry Leonardo, Alwin Reamillo, Jon Red, Raymond Red, Jun Ureta and Ian Victoriano – all recent alumni from the UP College of Fine Arts. The exhibitors themselves are unevenly mismatched, some showing sensitivity and prodigious skill even while others seem prematurely drawn into the lime-light.
Unfortunately, much of the work on display appears to have been hastily compiled, accomplished on short notice or called forth from some subterranean preserve. Any liberal contemporary audience asks only that exhibiting artists come prepared as a gesture of their sincerity, and lest we be accused of inter-generational bigotry, it is important to point out from the onset that many of the artworks here simply do not measure up to our most basic expectations.
This is not to say that the exhibit is entirely without merit, nor that its failings are exclusively those of tenderfoot inexperience.
Jerry Leonardo's wire-mesh constructions and Ian Victoriano's otherworldly mindscapes are distinctly lacking in originality. For openers, Leonardo's skeletal armatures have always reminded me of other people's work in general, and of those do-it-yourself sculpture hobby books in particular, rooted as they are in a well-worn tradition long consigned to the realm of the cliche. In his latest "Cocoon" series, he bears more than a striking resemblance to the renowned kinetic sculptor Harry Kramer, albeit at a standstill and on an infinitely more modest scale. The Spanish surrealist Miro, on the other hand, is clearly Victoriano's point of departure, although an urban iconography infuses his jaded vistas with a personal mythology assimilated into groundwork previously paved.
Then, too, even the art of the mundane must possess a certain level of metaphysical substance. The paintings of Jon Red, Raymond Red, Jun Ureta and Pablo Biglang-Awa literally make much ado about nothing, conjuring boisterous theatricality for its own sake. Playing blind man's bluff with a small arsenal of graphic odds and ends, their work is characterized by furious but empty flourish, being little more than melodramatic contrivances.
Only Alwin Reamillo, John Cinco and Henry Frejas succeed in renewing our longstanding faith in the young. Frejas paints with a freshness that is lyrically animated, if at times dangerously bordering on the trite. Reamillo has the makings of a major talent, a gifted diviner of semiological undercurrents, a painter of apocalyptic signposts. And we may yet forgive Cinco for his languid abstractions themselves square pegs in round holes – in the light of his impressive work with fetishistic power-objects and urban refuse.
Some like to lament that time is the only thing that the young possess in abundance. But in a few blessed instances, there is little need for very much else.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Young Art x 2: Growing Up Gifted” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, January 24, 1987
