ARNDT Catalogue Manila

ALWIN REAMILLO
You know you are in Filipino home if there is a picture of the Last Supper in the dining room.
This iconic scene showing Jesus Christ partaking his last meal with his disciples before he is
crucified is a fixture in Filipino dining setting. But while there is nothing extraordinary of finding
this scene in a dining area—Leonardo da Vinci’s “Il Cenacolo” after all was painted in a dining
hall—what is notable is the Biblical scene’s persistence as a subject for artists throughout the
centuries and across countries.
Alwin Reamillo has produced a large-scale cabinet to frame a refashioned Last Supper
layered with political undertones. Its base print consists of versions of the painting taken from
the internet and another by an unknown artist, mass-produced and sold on the sidewalks of
Quiapo church.
A version of this textile work of was first seen in a previous five-city installation, “Semena
Santa Cruxtations.” It is now reincarnated as the focal point of this tableau. One can make
out the glow of light that illuminates Christ at the center, while the apostles huddle at his side.
Normally coming in a frame, this common and kitschy icon is enlarged to create an expanse
suggestive of a theatre curtain, with the cabinet acting as the proscenium to the artists’
narratives.
The detritus of human presence and consumption interrupts this solemn scene. There are
plastic bottles, syringes, cow bones, spoons and mortar, garlic peelings, and hair. Peppering
it are text, company logos, and graphics, some image grafted by the artist into the fabric like
skin, to join the cast of Disney characters looming in the background.
The result is a work that overflows with iconography that reveals the artist’s current
preoccupation: identity formation and loss through the homogenization of culture as a result
of transnationalism and globalization. He also makes salient the economies of power that fuel
this condition.
One leitmotif that makes an appearance in this piece is the matchbox—an object that Reamillo
has repeatedly reimagined as a form and carrier of images and meaning. In fact, this tableau
is an oversized matchbox. Matchboxes are a product of industry and commerce, a container
of graphic imagery. They are portable and disposable. But what they contain carry a certain
power: the capacity to bring something to light and start a fire.