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MAYNILA<br />
MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW<br />
THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS, THE DAY IS SCORNFUL<br />
<strong>ARNDT</strong> SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS.<br />
BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35<br />
WWW.<strong>ARNDT</strong>BERLIN.COM<br />
C U R R A T E D B Y N O R M A N C R I S O L O G O
TATONG RECHETA TORRES<br />
MIKE ADRAO<br />
POW MARTINEZ<br />
NORBERTO ROLDAN<br />
GABBY BARREDO<br />
JOSE LEGASPI<br />
JIGGER CRUZ<br />
ZEAN CABANGIS<br />
KAWAYAN DE GUIA<br />
JOSE TENCE RUIZ<br />
SANTI BOSE<br />
DEX FERNANDEZ<br />
KALOY SANCHEZ<br />
ALFREDO ESQUILLO<br />
ALWIN REAMILLO<br />
<strong>ARNDT</strong> SINGAPORE. GILLMAN BARRACKS.<br />
BLK 22 LOCK ROAD #01-35<br />
WWW.<strong>ARNDT</strong>BERLIN.COM
Working in contemporary art is a privilege and the collaboration with<br />
living artists exiting and permanent source of inspiration and surprise.<br />
Working with a curator is an additional thrill for the dealer, as when giving<br />
„Carte Blanche“ to an external expert, the galerist himself is joining the<br />
audience, in their „Vorfreude“/enthusiastic anticipation for the venue. Like<br />
every other passionate art viewer the gallery owner is trying to imagine<br />
what the final show will look like, impatient to witness the dialogues the<br />
various works will enter with another.<br />
I am that fortunate galerist and Norman Crisologo is the curator of<br />
MAYNILA: MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHAPDI ANG ARAW<br />
(MANILA: THE DAY IS SCORNFUL, THE NIGHT IS RESTLESS).<br />
Norman Crisologo is not just an expert for Filippino Contemporary Art,<br />
he is also a collector, early-on supporter and follower of many artists<br />
careers but most importantly he is the artists friend. The idea for this<br />
show was born during one of the fascinating expeditions Norman, Insider<br />
and connoisseur of the incredibly rich and vibrant Philippine artworld,<br />
took me on.<br />
I immediately realised that if I would like to understand the recent<br />
developements in Contemporary Philippine Art better, I would have to<br />
explore <strong>Manila</strong> further. This vast, haunting, most vibrant and complex<br />
social and cultural organism that accomodates so many of this countries<br />
major artists, providing them stories, conflict and issues, some of the<br />
sourcematerial for their work.<br />
In one of our conversations, Norman Crisologo said that this exhibition<br />
will be more about evoking a „feeling“ than making a curatorial statement<br />
and far from claiming a comprehensive overview about Filippino<br />
Contemporary Art.<br />
I see this presentation as an „insiders guide“ and open invitation to go on<br />
a journey to the darker side of <strong>Manila</strong>, where the inspiration lays for so<br />
many visual artists, performing artists and filmmakers. Following in their<br />
footsteps and spirit we can get our own „<strong>Manila</strong>-Feeling“ and insight in<br />
this fascinating artistic universe.<br />
I thank Norman Crisologo for this incredibly generous contribution<br />
of enthusiasm, knowledge and passion with which he brought this<br />
exhibition together and for his support and advice to the artists during the<br />
production period. My utmost gratitude goes to the artists for accepting<br />
our invitation and contributing such outstanding new work to the show.<br />
And last but never the least, I would like to thank Sonia Jakimczyk, our<br />
gallery manager in Singapore and Tobias Sirtl, Lisa Polten and Karina<br />
Rozwadowska in Berlin for their steady and kind support.<br />
Matthias Arndt
I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY,<br />
AND I JUST SAID IT.<br />
NORMAN CRISOLOGO
“PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF...”<br />
It can be said that if you wander in the wilderness for 40 days<br />
and 40 nights, you will either become a prophet or a madman.<br />
Or perhaps both.<br />
But in <strong>Manila</strong>, it seems that it doesn’t take that long.<br />
As much as the city itself is a bustling metropolis, it is also a<br />
wasteland of the lost. Stand long enough in a corner and you<br />
can spot them: these solitary figures that stand, for all the<br />
world rushing past them, alone. Approaching them, you may<br />
even catch their attention long enough for them to return your<br />
stare… and then look past you. Move in even closer, you might<br />
even begin to discern their voices above the din, maybe reciting<br />
strange litanies to deities that have long absconded their houses<br />
of dwelling and left them to the devout and faithful to loiter in—or<br />
rather they may be in conversation with the city itself, allowing it<br />
to speak to them through the bang and clatter of the sidewalk,<br />
the cacophony of the car horns in traffic, or the susurrus of the<br />
waves from the bay. Arguably, these are true citizens of <strong>Manila</strong>,<br />
who are not mere fixtures in the urban landscape but possibly,<br />
keep the vision of the city alive—even if only in their minds.<br />
“Maynila: Maalinsangan ang Gabi, Mahapdi ang Araw” (<strong>Manila</strong>:<br />
The Nights are Restless, The Days are Scornful), is an exhibition<br />
of Filipino contemporary art that collects these visions and hears<br />
those voices. It chronicles a secret history of <strong>Manila</strong>—one that<br />
also considers the graffiti scrawled on the walls and counts the<br />
chalk outlines on the pavement as part of its story.<br />
There are no heroes and villains here, just the usual suspects.<br />
And all endings resound like the conclusion of prayers.<br />
ERWIN ROMULO
TATONG RECHETA TORRES<br />
There is something cinematic in the paintings of Tatong Recheta<br />
Torres. Like stills from a complex and indecipherable feature film,<br />
his canvases capture a specific moment, not necessarily one full<br />
of tension or suspense, but one of anticipation. They are frames<br />
that signal that something is about to happen.<br />
This cinematic sensibility comes naturally from a man who grew<br />
up under the shadows of downtown <strong>Manila</strong>’s once esteemed<br />
but now derelict cinemas, and whose childhood was nourished<br />
by a diet of horror and fantasy films in Betamax format. An<br />
architecture graduate, Torres is mostly entirely self-taught in the<br />
vocation of painting, though his apparent skill as a draughtsman<br />
is the product of early practice.<br />
The shifts one finds every time Torres releases a body of work<br />
reflect a restless desire for experimentation. He takes up the<br />
challenge of representing texture—scales, globules, hair—as<br />
a means to build his fictive worlds. His recent obsession with<br />
virtual reality feeds newer works where images tamed by pixels<br />
and code cross with dreamy scenes culled from memory.
MIKE ADRAO<br />
In an age enamored with installation, conceptual, or performance<br />
art, does good old drawing still have a chance to be recognized?<br />
Artists like Mike Adrao show that draughtsmanship still matters<br />
and that drawing remains a dynamic and unexhausted field.<br />
His large, charcoal canvases depicting anthropomorphic and<br />
biological forms show control, rigor and imagination. These<br />
images—each one teeming with intricate detail—are first born in<br />
his trusted sketchbook. On a large canvas inside his tiny studio<br />
above an Internet cafe, the mild-mannered Adrao lays them<br />
out and pieces them together in a slow, deliberate, physically<br />
demanding but sometimes meditative process.<br />
For this show, his ruminations on the sinister qualities of the city—<br />
the decadence, the corruption, the environmental negligence, the<br />
temptations of wealth and power—yield a charcoal, chiaroscuro<br />
work that is an allegory of life in the Philippine capital. It shows<br />
how little by little one is consumed by the grip of its structures and<br />
systems. Integrating Philippine currency vignettes and lacework,<br />
exploding manunggol jars and reptilian elements, the work can<br />
be turned upside-down, mimicking the topsy-turvy manner of<br />
existence in a desperately dense and chaotic setting.
POW MARTINEZ<br />
Irreverent, farcical, fantastic. Such can be said of the paintings of Pow Martinez, whose images<br />
range from improbable, cartoonish scenes executed in rough strokes to heavy impastos that<br />
near abstraction. He remains a believer of painting, of its endurance and inexhaustible potential.<br />
Perhaps the genre now suffers from the ease of falling to predictability and commoditization,<br />
which Martinez heavily guards his practice against. And so what he delivers are works that echo<br />
the city he lives in: brash and unpredictable, never tame.<br />
Consider his two pieces here. One depicts the contortions of a hermaphrodite-like figure<br />
whose breasts and other extremities pull out like gum. The other mimics a familiar high point of<br />
many suspense films: the dining scene. We bear witness to what is supposed to be a revolting<br />
instance of cannibalism, but Martinez has caricatured it to an almost comic effect.<br />
Such works reveal the irony that has become a leitmotif in the artist’s practice. Another is the<br />
fight against safe, sentimental, and pleasure-seeking aesthetics. Yes, this might be bad art for<br />
some, but perhaps rebellion is the point of the exercise. This hard-headedness and certain<br />
distrust for the ruling convention may have rubbed off from living in a city that saw many<br />
revolutions, and has long prized freedom of expression and individuality. Martinez confides he<br />
likes the city’s dirt and grit, and he allows his paintings to be similarly so. He prefers to ransack<br />
what is from the underground, the counterculture, the juvenile. Settling for what is mainstream<br />
is just plain insulting.
NORBERTO ROLDAN<br />
“Every act an artist makes is political,” says Norberto Roldan.<br />
In his paintings, installations, or intricate assemblages, one can<br />
always detect the biting social criticism in his works. Be it attacks<br />
on colonialism and rampant consumerism or oppressive systems<br />
of power, he has made his practice an avenue not just of personal<br />
expression but pure activism. For him, it is unconscionable that an<br />
artist does not engage. “One cannot turn a blind eye on political<br />
reality, no matter how apolitical your art may be.” To Roldan,<br />
every artist is part of a community and a country, and his practice<br />
has to find its place within these. Such political decisions extend<br />
to activities far beyond art-making. One example is his founding<br />
and running of Green Papaya Art Projects, one of the longestrunning<br />
artist-run initiatives in <strong>Manila</strong>. It supports alternative and<br />
unrepresented voices and encourages critical discourse.<br />
His work “Quiapo: Between Salvation and Damnation” involves<br />
a simulacrum of the famed <strong>Manila</strong> church that has been central<br />
to the city’s cultural and political histories. More than any other<br />
church, Quiapo has come to occupy an exceptional place within<br />
the Filipino imagination. Here is a site where Christian, Muslim<br />
and pagan beliefs intersect. It is where quotidian violence and<br />
debaucheries take place so close to where religious rites are<br />
practiced. A microcosm of <strong>Manila</strong>, the church and its grounds<br />
mirror the city’s former glories—now drowned out by the mire of<br />
urban blight, but also representing the colorful, divergent fabric<br />
from which the Filipino nation is made.
GABBY BARREDO<br />
Entering the artist’s workshop in a <strong>Manila</strong> suburb is like walking<br />
into a laboratory found only in the pages of science fiction.<br />
Here one finds discarded objects salvaged from junk shops,<br />
or donations by friends who were clearing out their houses.<br />
Under Gabriel Barredo’s hands, these unwanted materials are<br />
given new purpose. Old action figures, limbless dolls, saints in<br />
plastic, car parts, rubber strips, animal bone, art book cutouts,<br />
miniscule lights, and tiny motors. Almost like a scientist, he<br />
cuts, refashions, gilds, welds, and glues them together into an<br />
intricate, mechanical mass. What results is captivating and oneof-a-kind<br />
kinetic art, some of which are towering in scale.<br />
But the potency of Barredo’s work does not only lie in the flawless<br />
regeneration of rescued material and its definitely amusing light<br />
and electric circuitries. In fact, his work is very severe. It is littered<br />
with details that remind us of the endless horrors and hypocrisies<br />
of life: hunger, war, death, and decay. A screaming head here, an<br />
impaled figurine there. There is no attempt to sugarcoat these<br />
displays of darkness, whether they are personal or collective in<br />
nature. Like Bosch and Brueghel, Barredo continues art’s long<br />
tradition of depicting the monstrous and the malign. In such acts,<br />
we are confronted with the blade-sharp truths and are provoked<br />
to emotion.
JOSE LEGASPI<br />
Jose Legaspi knows the human body intimately<br />
—its creases and folds, its thickness and ends. But<br />
his works also show a certain skepticism. In his<br />
drawings, he subjects the body to much humiliation<br />
and profanity, at times drawing blood. He renders<br />
his characters ghostly and pallid, sometimes<br />
mangled, almost like cadavers.<br />
His works vary in texture, from his roughly doodled<br />
pastel drawings to striking, meticulously made<br />
photorealistic works. They sometimes portray the<br />
artist himself or people he is close to as ghoulish<br />
figures, often in debasing positions.<br />
These three works of charcoal and chalk belong to<br />
the larger ‘Phlegm’ installation. It was the outcome<br />
of a residency Legaspi held at Art in General in New<br />
York in 2001. According to the organization, it is<br />
a work, “that incorporates religious iconography,<br />
autobiography, and self-portraiture.”<br />
One shows a man hanging from a noose, his<br />
genitals exposed, possibly an act of suicide or a<br />
victim of lynching. Another shows a crucified figure<br />
bleeding profusely all over. But the most striking is<br />
the drawing of a body, chopped up and thrown to<br />
the rubbish bin.<br />
It can be speculated that it is Legaspi’s training as<br />
a biologist that affords him the distance from such<br />
violations of the body. From one side, these can<br />
be seen as an attack on our relentless obsession<br />
for the youth and vanity, something that eventually<br />
expires. From the other, they speak of emotional<br />
torture, estrangement and rage felt by the openly<br />
gay artist who lives in a country where conservative<br />
attitudes still prevail.<br />
Legaspi, who has been cited in Phaidon’s latest<br />
global survey on drawing, Vitamin D, produces<br />
works that pander to our basest emotions. On his<br />
canvases, he lets the Id loose. They are a riposte<br />
to our moralism and misplaced values. In putting<br />
these lurid pictures into view, we see that we<br />
haven’t seen everything in drawing yet.
JIGGER CRUZ<br />
The tradition of western painting in Asia has had its longest<br />
streak in the Philippines. It dates back to Spanish priests who<br />
taught local artists to paint religious scenes for the churches<br />
they had built. Art schools that espoused the western style<br />
soon opened. This was followed by artists who travelled to<br />
study in art academies in Europe, plus a generation who made a<br />
groundbreaking encounter with modernism.<br />
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that today’s generation of<br />
Filipino painters seek to deviate from this thread. Or at least<br />
remake it. One of them is Jigger Cruz, whose most recent works<br />
explore the possibilities of painting beyond the plane. For him,<br />
the canvas is no longer just a vessel for flat images. Rather, it<br />
too can function like a platform, a stage on which to hold his<br />
experiments. His probing concerns specifically with oil paint’s<br />
physicality: volume, sheen, and viscosity.<br />
Over an under painting, he throws very generous, almost obscene<br />
amounts of oil paint to obtain a sculptural dimensionality. For<br />
this show, he stacks three paintings executed in three different<br />
modes. This is then overrun by deposits of oil almost psychedelic<br />
in color and then cut open with a putty knife. The gross anatomy<br />
lays bare Cruz’s present preoccupation: the constant struggle<br />
between abstraction and figuration, as well as the relentless<br />
battle between tradition versus the avant-garde.
ZEAN CABANGIS<br />
A ruin can generate so much feeling of mystery. It can be the<br />
object of deep speculation. What is its history? How did it arrive<br />
at such a fate? What will be its future? Such are the questions<br />
that preoccupy Zean Cabangis, one of the youngest artists in<br />
this show. His recent ongoing series of work was strung together<br />
from encounters with old, abandoned houses he chanced upon<br />
during his bicycle excursions in the mountains of the Sierra<br />
Madre. These are houses that have been left abandoned, their<br />
roofs caved in, walls left unfinished, and floors are overgrown<br />
with weeds. But they are nothing more than interruptions on<br />
the landscape—reminders of dreams that have been stunted<br />
by financial difficulty, natural catastrophe or changes in family<br />
circumstances.<br />
One does not have to drive far out of the city to see such houses.<br />
They can even be seen within gated middle class subdivisions<br />
where properties are left abandoned and decaying as their<br />
owners find lives in other, more prosperous shores. Cabangis<br />
attempts to reclaim these structures’ dignity by piecing together<br />
parts of their selves, almost brick by brick.<br />
These works recall Fernando Amorsolo’s paintings of a <strong>Manila</strong><br />
destroyed by the Second World War. Flattened by bombs and<br />
fire, they show buildings bereft of human presence and whose<br />
glory and purpose have turned to ash.<br />
Curator Brian Dillon in a recent show for Tate Britain showed<br />
that ruin lust has captured the attention of artists for centuries<br />
and that this interest continues up until today. Ruins possess<br />
latent, quiet beauty but also portend of something uncertain, if<br />
not ominous. They may suggest the coming of a new life out of<br />
the rubble, but likewise reminds us of our vulnerability to the<br />
sudden turns of fortune.
KAWAYAN DE GUIA<br />
In the year 2007, the world reached an important milestone.<br />
It was the first time more people lived in cities than outside of<br />
them. Cities retain their pull because they remain places where<br />
destinies are made and dreams realized. But not all stories of<br />
migration to urban centers end happy. Such is the case for Ligaya<br />
Paraiso and Julio Madiaga, the protagonists of the acclaimed<br />
Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka’s 1975 film, Maynila sa Kuko ng<br />
Liwanag (The Claws of Light), whose hopes of a better life far<br />
from the province were dashed.<br />
De Guia took his cues from this important film for his multipanel<br />
work, Ligaya de Pilipinas or “Joy of the Philippines.”<br />
Unraveling on the pictorial plane are images suggestive of the<br />
megacity’s promises of progress as well as chaos. It is a topical<br />
representation of a city enjoying an unprecedented building<br />
boom. Take the avenues to any of its several business districts<br />
early in the morning and one sees hundreds of construction<br />
workers off to work riding in trucks, many, much like Julio, have<br />
come from afar to take gainful employment.<br />
But today’s city is no less harsh than Brocka’s vision of <strong>Manila</strong>.<br />
The capital’s development mimics the skyward trajectories of<br />
other cities the world over, where the gap between the ultrarich<br />
who dwell in luxury penthouses and the poor who live in<br />
shantytowns at street level are more than a few floors apart.<br />
De Guia has received important regional prizes such as the<br />
Ateneo, Signature, and Philip Morris art awards. His works have<br />
shown in spaces in Singapore, Germany, China, and Australia.<br />
He is also a primary convener of the Ax(is) art project, a collective<br />
that organized yearly festivals in Baguio and whose output was<br />
shown at the Singapore Art Museum at the 2013 Singapore<br />
Biennale.
JOSE TENCE RUIZ<br />
Recalling the seven arrows of the Christian martyr, St Sebastian, seven bars<br />
covered in aluminum skin pierce a chunk of hammered lead. This lump,<br />
suggestive of a prostrated body, is harnessed by a tangle of velvet belts that<br />
seem to act both as a protective cloak and a straitjacket. At its feet are cement<br />
slabs that carry a play on the Filipino words lumot (to molder) and limot (to<br />
forget).<br />
In the Philippines, religion keeps a strong foothold and the country’s artists<br />
have been reacting since time immemorial. There are those that have and still<br />
employ their talents to create its iconic imagery, and there are those who like<br />
Ruiz, which criticize its processes and have braved to bring the debate to such<br />
difficult terrain.<br />
Ruiz is particularly attracted to contradictions that appear in organized religion.<br />
Raised as a Catholic, he has many times reflected on the complex set of rules<br />
a belief system imposes on its followers. The sculpture, “Excruciate Ecstasy,”<br />
revisits the theme.<br />
“Rules are like rope or wings. They can be your protection but they can gag<br />
you,” he says. These can give you a sense of rootedness, but can similarly<br />
immobilize. But people ironically crave for them, because life is chaotic and<br />
religion has a way of stabilizing.”<br />
His sculpture also touches on the duality of pleasure and pain. This is something<br />
with which the Christian faithful negotiates within a universe of established<br />
rules. Sacrifices have to be made to achieve deliverance. “All struggle moves in<br />
and out between this two: ecstasy and pain,” he observes. It is a dichotomy he<br />
finds baffling. It is the jumping point from which his sculpture proceeds.<br />
Ruiz makes reference to the baroque imagery of St Sebastian, who has been<br />
depicted in the height of spiritual ecstasy as arrows cut through his flesh.<br />
Influenced by Ipoustéguy, Barlach, and Boccioni, he however makes use of<br />
distilled figuration, a manner that has made an impression on the generation of<br />
Filipino artists to which he belongs.<br />
But make no mistake. This work is not a reckless diatribe against the Christian<br />
belief system. Rather it is a considered and reasoned reaction to a reality within<br />
it. The artist after all recognizes the symbiosis between art and religion, the<br />
former advancing the message of the latter, a relationship that thrived in Europe<br />
and thrives up to now in the Philippines.<br />
What his sculpture does try to unravel are the idiosyncrasies that exist in that<br />
system. From such realization, one could perhaps move towards a rethink.<br />
That however entails Socratic humility, that one knows nothing. As Ruiz says,<br />
“one does not own anything absolute. Everything participates with its own<br />
contradiction.”
SANTIAGO BOSE<br />
Baguio-born Santiago is one of the important Filipino artists<br />
in recent history. As an art-maker, mentor, and founder of<br />
the Baguio Arts Festival, his artistic practice has been<br />
marked by an overwhelming desire in building a community<br />
among artists and making their work connected to the wider<br />
community they are situated in.<br />
He studied painting at the University of the Philippines, but<br />
he decided to choose other media to channel his visions.<br />
In her book, Image to Meaning, respected critic Alice<br />
Guillermo notes Bose’s desire to break from the limiting twodimensionality<br />
and ‘illusionist aesthetic’ of the genre. And so<br />
he worked found objects and mixed media to give his work<br />
its own vocabulary and dimension. This courage to take the<br />
less treaded path got the nod of many. His art has shown in<br />
major museums in the Asia-Pacific and he participated in<br />
important triennials and festivals.<br />
Guillermo distinctly highlights the spontaneous and<br />
experimentalist tendencies palpable in Bose’s work. Equally<br />
noticeable, as seen in his work at this show, is social and<br />
political consciousness. The mixed media work “I love Abu<br />
Sayaff” is one of the last works he had made before he<br />
died in 2002 at the age of 53. It appeared at a significant<br />
retrospective of his works at the Vargas Museum in ten years<br />
after, in a commemorative exhibition curated by Patrick<br />
Flores.
DEX FERNANDEZ<br />
Graffiti has always been seen as an indicator of the prevalence<br />
of disorder and deprivation in a city. But people ignore that it too<br />
is a barometer for the level of self-expression. Dex Fernandez is<br />
one of those <strong>Manila</strong> artists whose street-inspired art has obtained<br />
a distinctive mien. His Garapata Man or ‘Flea’ Man is an original<br />
comic-book-like character that has almost become his signature<br />
and emblem. This caricatured representation of a man/house<br />
parasite has appeared on public walls as stickers or spray painted<br />
graffiti. It also appears in Fernandez’s wildly intricate murals, which<br />
have graced walls of museums as well as commercial centers.<br />
Another vein in Fernandez’s practice is his mixed media work. He<br />
normally employs photographs and found images, which he overlays<br />
with his knotty illustrations in paint. Here we see the same lighthanded<br />
dexterity to render his complex and unpredictable detailing.<br />
These works have a hallucinatory effect on one hand, but also fires<br />
off snippets of satire. Such exercises of wit and sarcasm, cloaked<br />
under his dainty drawings, carry Fernandez’s own deeper views on<br />
surviving the city. It just so happens his way of messaging is both<br />
comfortable inside gallery walls as well as rundown streets.
KALOY SANCHEZ<br />
A critic once wrote that the Filipino concept of privacy is<br />
that there is none. There is evidence for it in the everyday;<br />
from the way our traditional houses are constructed to the<br />
way we consume content in social media. And with <strong>Manila</strong><br />
being the most densely populated city in the planet, it is so<br />
easy to crash into other people’s business, whether it is by<br />
decision or not.<br />
Kaloy Sanchez lets us fall into such private scenes. The<br />
painter gives us glimpses into various states of the human<br />
condition, as they are experienced in isolation in personal<br />
spaces: anger, loneliness, physical pleasure, mania, lethargy,<br />
slow decay. His canvases are like windows into his subjects’<br />
intimate lives, framing them in at a particular instance, with<br />
us peeking through like voyeurs.<br />
Sanchez’s depictions have been compared to the fleshy<br />
portraits of Lucian Freud as well as the works of Egon<br />
Schiele. The nudes that line his practice do not follow the<br />
classical take on the idealized body, but rather leans towards<br />
what is ordinary but genuine. Often raw, unembellished, and<br />
monochromatic, his paintings lay bare the tentativeness of<br />
our bodies and existence, and the psychological burden of<br />
having to face this fact alone.<br />
“Onania” is an explicit acrylic and graphite portrait of a<br />
seated female wrapped in a sarong. She is pleasuring herself<br />
inside an apartment illuminated by neon lights from the street<br />
outside. It is a work that opens up to multiple subtexts. For<br />
instance, this gesture easily slips into the thorny issue of the<br />
objectification of women. Here, after all, the woman is the<br />
focus of the gaze of three onlookers: the dog, the man offframe<br />
and the viewer.<br />
Sanchez insists that this is not his intention. It is, however,<br />
a remaking of an early portrait. In that work it was he who<br />
was masturbating. Then as it is now, he revisits the theme of<br />
taboos that remain prevalent in today’s societies in spite of<br />
having become technologically modern. “Why don’t we talk<br />
about it, if everyone is doing it?” he contends. Furthermore,<br />
his work stokes a further debate: that of how much religion<br />
should play a hand in the matters of the body and private life.<br />
This painting and his previous one show Sanchez’s position<br />
on where the limits could lie.
ALFREDO ESQUILLO<br />
Quiapo has long inspired artists such as Alfredo Esquillo Jr.<br />
who make periodic visits to this revered district of <strong>Manila</strong><br />
and the famed church that sits at its center. Quiapo is a<br />
universe of its own, where Christian and pagan traditions<br />
meld together, religious dogma intertwines with the occult<br />
and superstition, while commerce does its business on one<br />
side. The periphery of the church is the site where many of<br />
these beliefs are professed; some are even brazenly peddled.<br />
On its pavement, aphrodisiacs, sex toys, and implements for<br />
black magic share space with amulets, prayer books, and<br />
Christian holy figures. Bizarre and almost contradictory, their<br />
coexistence points to a culture that places high importance<br />
on devotion and faith.<br />
One of Quiapo’s established characters has been the subject<br />
of Esquillo’s artwork for more than a decade. Lauro Gonzales<br />
or Mang Lauro, a one-time trader turned preacher, believed<br />
that the Philippines is the New Jerusalem. This prophet of a<br />
belief tinged with nationalism has appeared in many of the<br />
artist’s hyperrealist paintings and has been the subject of one<br />
of his video documentaries. On one hand, it is the resonance<br />
of Mang Lauro’s life story to that of Esquillo’s own father<br />
that made the preacher interesting to him. On the other, it is<br />
also what Mang Lauro represents: The embodiment of the<br />
country’s relationship with spirituality, one that is intensified<br />
and made complex by the interweaving of belief systems,<br />
both foreign and indigenous.
ALWIN REAMILLO<br />
You know you are in Filipino home if there is a picture of the Last Supper in the dining room.<br />
This iconic scene showing Jesus Christ partaking his last meal with his disciples before he is<br />
crucified is a fixture in Filipino dining setting. But while there is nothing extraordinary of finding<br />
this scene in a dining area—Leonardo da Vinci’s “Il Cenacolo” after all was painted in a dining<br />
hall—what is notable is the Biblical scene’s persistence as a subject for artists throughout the<br />
centuries and across countries.<br />
Alwin Reamillo has produced a large-scale cabinet to frame a refashioned Last Supper<br />
layered with political undertones. Its base print consists of versions of the painting taken from<br />
the internet and another by an unknown artist, mass-produced and sold on the sidewalks of<br />
Quiapo church.<br />
A version of this textile work of was first seen in a previous five-city installation, “Semena<br />
Santa Cruxtations.” It is now reincarnated as the focal point of this tableau. One can make<br />
out the glow of light that illuminates Christ at the center, while the apostles huddle at his side.<br />
Normally coming in a frame, this common and kitschy icon is enlarged to create an expanse<br />
suggestive of a theatre curtain, with the cabinet acting as the proscenium to the artists’<br />
narratives.<br />
The detritus of human presence and consumption interrupts this solemn scene. There are<br />
plastic bottles, syringes, cow bones, spoons and mortar, garlic peelings, and hair. Peppering<br />
it are text, company logos, and graphics, some image grafted by the artist into the fabric like<br />
skin, to join the cast of Disney characters looming in the background.<br />
The result is a work that overflows with iconography that reveals the artist’s current<br />
preoccupation: identity formation and loss through the homogenization of culture as a result<br />
of transnationalism and globalization. He also makes salient the economies of power that fuel<br />
this condition.<br />
One leitmotif that makes an appearance in this piece is the matchbox—an object that Reamillo<br />
has repeatedly reimagined as a form and carrier of images and meaning. In fact, this tableau<br />
is an oversized matchbox. Matchboxes are a product of industry and commerce, a container<br />
of graphic imagery. They are portable and disposable. But what they contain carry a certain<br />
power: the capacity to bring something to light and start a fire.
MANILA: THE CITY THAT WOULD NOT WEEP<br />
In geological terms, <strong>Manila</strong> lies on young swamps, created from<br />
the pressure exerted by basaltic magma beneath the earth’s crust,<br />
emerging from the womb of the Pasig River only within the last<br />
1.7 million years, or 62 million years after the dinosaurs massasphyxiated.<br />
For 99.95% of its history, <strong>Manila</strong> was occupied by<br />
Stegodons, then elephants. Christ, Caesar, and Confucius had been<br />
dead for over a thousand years before the (so far) earliest traces<br />
of humans in <strong>Manila</strong> were discovered. The discovery was made in<br />
the 1960s, in the now low-key Santa Ana district, beside one of the<br />
very few old <strong>Manila</strong> churches that had survived the Second World<br />
War. A mass grave site was unearthed, with over two hundred<br />
bodies buried together with over one thousand pieces of Chinese<br />
earthenware dated to around 1000 to 1200 CE. Some of these<br />
bodies were found with Chinese plates inverted over their faces<br />
and over their sex organs. No one knows why, though modern-day<br />
minds might assume that some sort of Christian modesty had an<br />
influence. The graves are likewise oriented in a scatter of directions,<br />
except towards the East. Again, no one knows why.<br />
The etymological story of <strong>Manila</strong> skews towards the pastoral, rooted<br />
in unremarkable mangrove shrubbery that once dominated the<br />
shores of <strong>Manila</strong> Bay. Scyphiphora Hydrophyllacea in Linneanese,<br />
nila in Tagalog. “May nila,” (there is nila), a helpful native once told<br />
an imperious stranger who demanded to know where he stood.<br />
Filipinos have always been known for their kindness to strangers.<br />
It was strangers from Spain who undertook the organization of<br />
<strong>Manila</strong> as a city, with all the formal paperwork that was involved.<br />
The Spanish were not the first Westerners to set foot in <strong>Manila</strong>; the<br />
Portuguese had already been engaged in trade with Manileños.<br />
Rajah Soliman, the young ruler of <strong>Manila</strong>, had heard of the Spanish<br />
conquest of other islands in the archipelago. He sought to bide<br />
time. When the first Spanish warships sailed into <strong>Manila</strong> Bay, he<br />
entered into a pact of friendship with Goiti, the leader of the armada.<br />
This pact, as with a disturbing number of prominent contracts in<br />
Philippine history, was sealed in blood. Soliman, however, had every<br />
intention of slaughtering his new fair-skinned friends but thought it<br />
prudent to await first the arrival of the rains in June. Fatefully, <strong>Manila</strong><br />
in June of 1571 remained dry, and the forces of the just-as-devious<br />
Goiti attacked first.<br />
The kingdom led by Soliman was pacified in short order. The<br />
considerable Chinese community, which had already settled in<br />
<strong>Manila</strong>, proved more difficult to regulate. The new Spanish overlords<br />
confined these Chinese residents (whom they called Sangleys) into<br />
a ghetto known as Parian. Due to occasional Sangley revolts, the<br />
Parian would be destroyed then rebuilt in 1581, 1583, 1588, 1597,<br />
1603, 1629, and 1642. After each pogrom, author Nick Joaquin<br />
says, “<strong>Manila</strong> would find itself without masons, cooks, barbers,<br />
carpenters, cobblers, tailors, smiths, scribes, printers, cowboys and<br />
accountants.” In the end, the Sangleys would be relocated into a<br />
new district known as Binondo, which still stands today, claimed as<br />
the oldest Chinatown in the world.<br />
The saving grace of the Spaniards was that they did not bring<br />
with them the same communicable diseases that wiped out 90%<br />
of the peoples they conquered in the Americas. Or perhaps the<br />
Malay stock was just sturdier. The Spanish also brought with them<br />
Christianity—of the muscular sort honed from the centuries-long war<br />
of liberation of the Spanish homeland from the Moors. The Catholic<br />
prelates appear to have been especially perverse towards the wellbeing<br />
of the natives to whom they preached. The Philippines is the<br />
only former colony of Spain today where Spanish never took hold as<br />
the common popular tongue, in large part due to the refusal of the<br />
friars to have Filipinos learn the language. A succession of secular<br />
Spanish municipal governments installed in <strong>Manila</strong> were frustrated<br />
by the insistence of the Church to maintain control; one Governor-<br />
General found himself at the receiving end of a murderous lynch<br />
mob stoked by most unpacifist friars.<br />
There is no escaping that despite the constitutional wall that divides<br />
church and state, the Philippines remains Catholic to the bone. Every<br />
television station pauses programming at three in the afternoon to<br />
broadcast a prayer dedicated to the Divine Mercy of Jesus. Every<br />
government office has a Catholic altar at worst, a Catholic prayer<br />
room at best, perhaps to help mitigate the stench of corruption<br />
that otherwise pervades. The most attended events inside even<br />
the toniest of shopping malls are the Sunday masses. Yet Filipino<br />
Catholicism is a brand that developed with minimal interference<br />
from faraway Rome, more susceptible to the influence of old animist<br />
instincts than of the European doctors of the Church.<br />
Go to Quiapo Church, home of a much-touched, much-kissed Black<br />
Nazarene statue. Unless the doors are shut (and they rarely are), the<br />
scene inside is of constant frenzy. There are the walkers roaming<br />
from venerated icon to venerated icon; the stationary kneelers<br />
offering thanksgiving sometimes, desperation more often; and the<br />
walking kneelers going down the center aisle at glacial pace in the<br />
belief that the greater pain inflicted on the patella, the greater the<br />
heavenly gain.<br />
The public square that lies outside Quiapo Church, known as Plaza<br />
Miranda, features an unorganized market of hawkers selling a wide<br />
variety of herbs and potions, none of them coming with a seal of<br />
approval from a government regulatory agency, but each of which<br />
comes with a guarantee of better health, if not bowel movements. It
is an adventure to go to Plaza Miranda, which once was touted as the<br />
local version of Hyde Park but now occupies the dingier subsection<br />
of the Dickensian universe. Two notorious acts of political violence<br />
occurred at Plaza Miranda. In 1947, a barber hurled a grenade at a<br />
platform where President Manuel Roxas was delivering a speech.<br />
A quick-thinking general kicked the yet-unexploded grenade from<br />
the stage onto the crowd; no one really remembers the name of<br />
the two people in the crowd who were killed by the resulting blast.<br />
In 1971, yet another grenade exploded during a political rally at<br />
Plaza Miranda. This time there was no one to deflect the grenade,<br />
so several dignitaries were injured. All of the nine persons who died<br />
were killed offstage as they stood among the throng.<br />
One of those injured in the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing was Ramon<br />
Bagatsing, then a Congressman opposed to the rule of President<br />
Ferdinand Marcos. The bomb cost Bagatsing one of his legs, but<br />
helped gain him election that year as Mayor of <strong>Manila</strong>. Within a few<br />
years, Marcos had imposed rule by martial law, with Bagatsing by<br />
now a Marcos stalwart who remained mayor of <strong>Manila</strong> until three<br />
days after Marcos was ousted in 1986. Bagatsing remains the most<br />
prominent Filipino of Indian decent to achieve high political office.<br />
His constituents, predictably, called him “Bumbay”; a nickname<br />
which he accepted with aplomb despite the racist overtones;<br />
Filipinos have been calling émigrés from the Indian subcontinent<br />
“Bumbay” ever since the first Sepoys arrived in <strong>Manila</strong>, as part of<br />
the British invasion force that arrived in 1762.<br />
It may come as a surprise to learn that for two years (1762-1764),<br />
<strong>Manila</strong> formed part of the British Empire, an afterthought of the<br />
Seven Year’s War. Manileños were unmoved; they continued with<br />
afternoon siestas instead of high tea. The Spanish, though, were<br />
unnerved by the exposure of their vulnerability. After regaining<br />
<strong>Manila</strong>, they reorganized the city’s defenses, eliminating several<br />
districts by relocating their population. Towns in <strong>Manila</strong> such as<br />
Bagumbayan, San Juan and Santiago disappeared even from the<br />
collective memory.<br />
The rest of <strong>Manila</strong> withstood several attempts at elimination. Almost<br />
every resident developed smallpox, and the survivors lived with<br />
the scars. There was a plague in 1628 and in 1645 and earthquake<br />
so catastrophic that hardly any buildings were left standing (The<br />
Spanish did not bother to record how many Filipinos had died in the<br />
quake). Another earthquake in 1863 destroyed the main cathedral<br />
and the Governor’s palace among others. The blow from which<br />
<strong>Manila</strong> nearly did not survive was the eponymous battle waged<br />
over it between the Americans and the Japanese invaders, in the<br />
closing months of the Second World War. The strategic destruction<br />
by the Japanese of key bridges left the most affluent districts of<br />
<strong>Manila</strong> isolated, ripe for the killing. Those who were trapped were<br />
slaughtered where they stood, or herded into dank prison cells<br />
or churches where they were slaughtered where they knelt. Even<br />
the President of the German Club was sliced with bayonets as he<br />
invoked the eternal friendship of Tojo and Hitler. While the Japanese<br />
killed the people; the Americans destroyed the buildings with bombs.<br />
The walled city of Intramuros, once the heart of Spanish rule over<br />
the islands, ceased to exist after nearly four hundred years. Only<br />
one structure remained standing after the American bombs did their<br />
worst: San Agustin Church. It had been deliberately spared so that<br />
American G.I.s navigating through the ruined city would have one<br />
visual point of reference that identified where they were. Today, San<br />
Agustin Church is the oldest surviving building in the Philippines.<br />
Immediately after the war, the newly independent Philippines,<br />
through its Congress, voted to build a great memorial that would<br />
commemorate the lives and legacies lost in February of 1945. No such<br />
memorial was ever built. The great <strong>Manila</strong> Cathedral, reconstructed<br />
just eighty years before, after the great 1863 earthquake, remained<br />
for years a massive ruin. In time, refugees from much less massive<br />
ruins rebuilt their lives within the rubbles of the church. They were<br />
eventually driven out when they rebuilt the grand church, but they<br />
relocated elsewhere in the city, bearing the same lack of hope.<br />
<strong>Manila</strong> soon teemed with slums of the sort that was fodder for fundraising<br />
appeals by humanitarian groups. Once, there was a grand<br />
dame named Imelda who was seen fit to be installed as governor<br />
of <strong>Manila</strong>. Her solution to the slum problem was to build high walls<br />
that sheltered the informal settlers from the prying eyes of her jetset<br />
friends such as George “Zorro the Gay Blade” Hamilton and Van<br />
“Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1” Cliburn.<br />
<strong>Manila</strong> has more people now, in part because contraception is not<br />
readily available and public health advances now allow more people<br />
to live into their sixties. The slums remain, as with the rich and the<br />
aspirants to be rich. Manileños of vastly unequal states have come<br />
together, as always, in an unsettled but necessary co-existence, not<br />
only with each other, but also with the ghosts of many more who, if<br />
given another stab, would have much preferred a life that was not<br />
unfair.<br />
Oliver X.A. Reyes
acknowledgements and credits<br />
Photos Tim Serrano<br />
words Irwin Cuz, OLIVER X.A. REYES<br />
CATALOGUE DESIGN AugGie fontanilla<br />
Erwin Romulo, Kissa Castañeda mcdermot, Kristine Caguiat,<br />
Dawn Atienza, Marya SAlang, Tina Fernandez, Lorrie Ojeda, trickie lopa,<br />
The Santi Bose estate, Jason Tan, Patricia Barcelon, Mica Solmoro, Anna Disini,<br />
Esquire Philippines and the entire <strong>ARNDT</strong> family.<br />
Curated by Norman Crisologo<br />
Music by Electronicoups, Caliph8, Malek Lopez and Moon Fear Moon