PAINTINGS
"SPOLARIUM"
by Juan Luna y Novicio
A NATURAL CULTURAL TREASURE
(National Museum Declaration No. 1-2006)
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"14 MISSED CALLS"
Alexander Mercaida Roxas
Oil Canvas
Sacrificial lamb is the masked innocent child clad in white pajamas, prostate on the floor, and crouched in foetal position that alludes to the shape of a telephone. Beside him is a toy gun which is a symbol for the violence that has wrought immeasurable destruction, impelled by widespread hunger, unemployment, homelessness, and the menace of illicit drugs. The title is a direct reference to the past 14 administrations since the country attained independence, a searing capsulation of the mismanagement by the nation's elected leaders who have refused to listen to the desperate calls and please of the people. The painting is a darkly luminous meditation on the state of the country's leadership, a fraught signifier of the failure to lead the Filipinos to The Promised Life.
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"THE CURE"
Armand Jay S. Arago
Acrylic on Canvas
With the intense glare of radiant light overhead him, the anonymous man is either genius or mad scientist, solitary in his work, transfixed in a vision of a world obedient to his will. Like a surgeon, noble in his white smock, he works with sharp precision, as though the least errant move can mean a valentine or a valedictory to a vanished world. The scene has all the hushed reverence o a priest celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, except that the sacred altar is a stark slab where a placement is a map of the world, the missal a DIY manual on how to make an explosive. The obsessed terrorist is the evil juggernaut in our midst.
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"CARITON"
Rodrigo R. Clapano
Oil in Canvas
Like an Escher painting, "Carton" is an ingenious visual trick, but it is so unlike the Dutch graphic artist's confounding stairways and passages that dizzily cause disorientation. We are witness not to a mere sleight-of-hand, as it were, but to a disturbing fissure that bruisingly allegorizes in the Philippine experience. An unflinching look at the contrast between the privileged rich and the deprived poor, "Cariton" - itself a word play on luxury car and the grimy pushcart - is social realism on the cutting edge, laced with poisonous sarcasm.
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"STEAL-LIFE"
Salvador Corpuz Sierra
Acrylic on Canvas
A still life is defined as "a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flower, plants, rocks or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, etc.... Still life paintings before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted." This particular still life (with its typically Pinoy word play on the word "steal") has a coldly bizarre because totally unexpected, tableau of objects, crammed inside a freezer, alluding to the phenomenon of global warming. Already we are experiencing its effects in the extreme weather changes and disturbances. The choice of the freezer as the alcove for an assembled variety of objects (most noticeably the burst, deflated globe) references "the mountain glaciers and snow cover that had decreased in both the northern and southern hemisphere." Around the edges of the freezer are the childlike doodles that aim to remind us of the need to restore the balance of nature.
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"HAGDAN-HAGDANG PANGARAP"
Bonifacio G. De Guzman Jr.
Mixed Media on Canvas
A mad scrambled up a phalanx of ever-rising ladders, as frail and spindly as spider's legs, is this highly charged, but ebullient painting. In defiance of gravity, children climb the vertiginous heights. As though participants in a game show, clambering up the tangled staircases to the heavens of their dreams, the children are tragicomic caricatures as depicted by the artist. It is all frenzied fun, in the charmingly naive style reminiscent of comic books and cartoon characters. On the concrete walls that support these fragile scaffoldings are the childlike scrawls of dreams and merriment. Our sad prescience that thier expectations of life will remain unfulfilled will send these children crashing to the ground.
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"PHILIPPINE DEEP"
Manuel Lotsu Q. Manes
Oil on Canvas
Of his own handiwork, the artist dispassionately remarks: "Drowning is a scenario that usually depicts a struggle to survive, of holding onto anything, and of gasping for air. But the stillness in the painting, while a family of nine is neck-deep in seemingly calm waters, disturbs."
As an indictment of Philippine life, few works can match this painting for the poignancy of its despair and resignation. A portrait of a people that have finally given up all hope of a better life, it is a specter of almost pathological pain. For all its stillness and serenity, it is a grotesque specter, like watching a suicide leaping off to his fate. In brief, it is an allegorical vision of a country..... in deep ----.
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"WHERE EVERYTHING IS BROKEN"
Chester L. Calayag
Oil in Canvas
In this poignantly painted image of a face of a girl distraught over what seems to be a withering house-cake, the sign of a fractured household is stark. And bearing the brunt of the disunion is the child, who may well be the daughter caught in the crossfire of marital strife. The artist, whose precocious talent is clearly demonstrated, reveals both emotional condition and psychological insight, and a form that is infused with rigor and sadness.
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"DISCLAIMER"
Melvin B. Culaba
Oil in Canvas
The artist has initiated a series on urban scenes in various states of disrepair. The images convey a sense of entropy, the failure of modernity, and the melancholy of progress. The artist expectations of a bursting metropolis, speed being its main trape.
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"NANG YUMANIG ANG MUNDO"
(When The World Shook)
Ricky V. Ambagan
Mixed Media
Fact or apocrypha, an urban anecdote engendered this, literally, wall-shaking painting. It was said that a legendary First Lady once bought an entire bookshelf from a venerable London antiquarium bookshop because the leather-bound vintage books would "look good" in her husband's study.
Pop-phantasmal is this vision of a heavily-weighted bookshelf tilted at rakish angle, with the nooks propitiously held in place. It is mirage or illusion that such tectonic disturbance brought to life the characters that may have lain inert between the pages of these unread books? Japanese samurais rise amidst battle tanks, while soldiers lurk between the nooks and crannies of books. Pope Benedict is in good company with a Tibetan monk and a worshiping Muslim while Mao Tse Tung is in dalliance with the Mona Lisa. Indeed, a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon.
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SCULPTURE
"PORTRAIT OF A FILIPINO AS A CONCEPTUAL ARTIST"
Ronald J. Hilario
Polychrome Carved Fruit Wood
The statuary of a person wielding a brush with a monkey on her back holding an international art magazine alludes to two lines of critique. First, there is the tension between the body and mind, which translates into craft and concept. Second, there is the reference to the predicament of the Filipino artist who must respond to the expectations of both.
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"LEGASPI AND THE FOUNDING OF MANILA"
by Napoleon Abueva, National Artist
Assisted by Renato Rocha and Jose Mendoza
Molave Wood
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"IDIOT BOX"
J. Elizabeth Navarro
Wood
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"BUST OF MRS. BERNARDA TINIO DE GABALDON"
Guillermo Tolentino
Marble
"PARAISADO (AZUL)"
Jose Tence Ruiz
in collaboration with Danilo Ilag-ilag
Installation
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