Blind Hope, Willful Ignorance, & Obscene Inequality... (The State We're In)

Blind Hope, Willful Ignorance & Obscene Inequality...

(The State We’re In)

Works by: RM De Leon

Ronald Achacoso

Winner Jumalon

Cris Villanueva Jr.

Raul Rodriguez

Blind Hope, Willful Ignorance & Obscene Inequality...

(The State We’re In)

September 9 to 30 2023

Works by:

RM De Leon

Ronald Achacoso

Winner Jumalon

Cris Villanueva Jr.

Raul Rodriguez

ART DIRECTOR

ART MANAGER

EXHIBITION TEAM

Thess Ponce

Roy Abrenica

Mariela Araza

CURATED BY

CATALOGUE DESIGN

EXHIBITION NOTES BY

Copyright © 2023 Galleria Duemila Inc.

Silvana Ancellotti-Diaz

Liezel Marata

Edgar Bautista

Gabriel Abalos

Jose Joeffrey Baba

RM De Leon

Kyle Azarcon

Lena Cobangbang

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system transmitted in any form by any means without the written consent of the above mentioned copyright holders, with the exceptional reasonably brief excerpts and quotation used in articles, critical essays or research.

Blind Hope, Willful Ignorance, & Obscene Inequality... (The State We’re In)

Art had long abandoned its work of just proffering beauty and truth. In a fraught world, its work had been confused and has been rather tasked to do by the bidding of its wielder when they try to own it like the whore of Babylon. They say we are at this inevitable irreversible stage of decadence, unabated consumption, irrepressible depravity. What do artists have to do with all this? Are they party to this complicity?

The wages for their labors have always been paid by who’s in power - the church, the newly-minted mercantile class of the Renaissance, the Medicis, titled royals who use their empire as their Costco and Kidzoona, and now CEOs of app start-ups and hedge funders of extractive industries; And we exalt at their validation in brick and mortar imaginariums.

They say it was, is, necessary, as to reflect the times they have lived in, but it is rather a world that is their oyster, a manifest of the triumph of the will. Movements that have characterized art periods in (Western) art history - have they really been natural impetuses borne out of artists’ drive to push possibilities or rather the drive of the invisible testicular hands of capital? Who really pushes what?

Socio-political

analyst Max Haiven succinctly

puts it as:

“The financiers of Wall Street or the City of London or Shanghai or Frankfurt believe that, like artists, they are bringing their creativity into the world and manifesting their will, in this same romantic image that we have of artists. Although when capitalists make mistakes you get global

warming, nuclear war, reactionary authoritarian governments.”

Laocoon unheeded, the hydra is actually an Ouroboros, a never-ending snake game, postponing the inevitable tail-biting. Who holds the mirror to this and finds instead a gorgon frozen? I guess, ugly times equals ugly art, eh?

Dean Kissick, co-curator of a show in Nahmad Contemporary NY, and mirror wielder says: “If an artist’s work is a reflection of their experiences in the world, inevitably, the work’s aesthetics will match that reality….. we live in ugly times, ugly paintings can offer us a way to confront this ugliness and find beauty in it.”

To which in mischief and glib Umberto Eco assents to: “Ugliness is more fun than beauty.”

To which this “ugliness” seems to get a free-for-all free pass in the ever persistent medium and platform of painting. Eco’s tomic treatise, rather meandering on “ugliness” within the changing canon of this medium pretty much pisses on Kant’s universalism of aesthetics, for to ascertain beauty is to have detachment, cold cold detachment. In contrast to ugliness that has no similar standard aesthetic judgment for it, it rather appeals much to our senses, invoking instantaneous disgust, repulsion and wonder. Ah, but then there is the clincher, that “ugliness” can be rendered beautifully. Consider Chaim Soutine’s rotting meat, or Jusepe de Ribera’s bearded mother brazenly nursing an infant, or Lucian Freud’s pockmarked, cellulite-ridden fleshly bodies. A quality that has no set standard, or that which affects so intimately, is pretty tricky. Yet it appeals much to the carnal, its viscerality lends so well to viscous paint. It may however be the ultimate challenge for the paint and its painter.

One of the participating artists of this exhibit, Raul Rodriguez recalls the time when Roberto Chabet introduced them to the idea of the ‘ugly’ as a turn-around from a conceptual attitude

to a more painterly approach in art making. As a painting student in Chabet’s class in UPCFA, their first plate was to make a “bad painting” which was to him was very counterintuitive (1980s). It was also the period of those crazy German guys usually lumped together under the Neue Wilde when “de-skilling” was rather a “skill”, a virtue even in approaching painting as an attitude leaning rather on the punk, the counter-canon. It is “a shedding of an old skin, a kind of alienation that calls everything into question”, as German painter Charline von Heyl would say. For Rodriguez, it was “Chabet’s way of saying that painting could be a dying discipline unless it turns its bowels out for reexamination.”

It is rather a curious mix that curator RM De Leon has gathered for this exhibit. From a motley generation but coherently all painterly in their own way, quietly thriving in their persistence - Rodriguez’s work problematizes the rhetorics and history of painting, while Villanueva intuits play and happenstance in his practice; De Leon breaks and re-creates forms in mixing pictorial elements from print media and gesturely marks; Achacoso divinates apocryphal symbols that primordiate the abstract; Jumalon’s portraits tacitly illustrates the tenuous process of memory, where facial features are stenographed into dashes, strokes, dollops, and smears in distilling the wavering essence of their persons.

Painters all, for certain, they are. Yet, do not fit a rigid rubric. They whiz and sail through tides, where they maybe dragons, naked emperors or vain corporate men.

Lena Cobangbang

Lena Cobangbang is a writer, curator, production designer, and art manager. She was a founding member of the seminal artist’s collective & independent art space, Surrounded by Water, in the later 90s and early 2000s. She was shortlisted for the Ateneo Art Awards in 2005 and received the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Thirteen Artists Award in 2006. In 2008, She was granted a fellowship at the HAO Summit for emerging artists and curators & completed her artist/curator research residency exchange between Green Papaya Art Projects and Pekarna Magdalenske Mreze in 2010. In 2008, she was a participating artist in the Singapore Biennale.

INDEX

Rodriguez, Raul

“The Last Modern Painting #197”

acrylic on wood panel

105.41 x 135.64 cm

2014

Rodriguez, Raul

“This is Not A Still Life (Apple-Head Pretext)” oil on canvas

121.92 x 152.40 cm

2023

Rodriguez, Raul

“Form Descends Like Power” oil on canvas

91.44 x 121.92 cm

2023

Rodriguez, Raul “Head Turner” oil on wood panel

121.92 x 152.40 cm

2006

Villanueva Jr., Cris

“It Never Comes Easy”

acrylic & oil on canvas and wooden objects

121.82 x 121.82 cm

2023

Villanueva Jr., Cris

“Hiding in Plain Sight”

acrylic & oil on canvas and wooden objects

121.82 x 121.82 cm

2023

Villanueva Jr., Cris

“Revealing the Truth about Time”

acrylic & oil on canvas and wooden objects

121.82 x 121.82 cm

2023

De Leon, RM

“Rabbits in the Woods”

acrylic on paper

121 x 140 cm

2020

De Leon, RM

“Homage to Bobby Chabet”

acrylic & mixed media on paper

122 x 148.5 cm

2023

De Leon, RM “The Blue”

acrylic on paper

114.5 x 125 cm

2018

De Leon, RM

“Untitled (Brown)”

acrylic on paper

122 x 148.5 cm

1993 - 2023

Jumalon, Winner “Temporada II”

oil on canvas

91.44 x 91.44 cm

2023

Jumalon, Winner “Temporada III” oil on canvas

91.44 x 91.44 cm

2023

Achacoso, Ronald “Cracks and Abysses” oil on canvas

123 x 92 cm

2023

Achacoso, Ronald “No God in the Machine” oil on canvas

123 x 92 cm

2023

Achacoso, Ronald

“All the Rest is Rust and Stardust”

oil on canvas

123 x 92 cm

2023

GALLERIA DUEMILA was established in 1975 by Italian born Silvana Ancellotti-Diaz. Duemila means "twentieth century", and it was this vision that inspired Duemila's advocacy in promoting and preserving Philippine contemporary art. To date, it is the longest running commercial art gallery in the Philippines maintaining a strong international profile. With the vision to expose its artists locally and within the ASEAN region, Duemila complements its exhibits with performances, readings and musical events in its custom-built gallery in Pasay City, Manila.

Galleria Duemila takes pride in being the only local gallery to publish and mount retrospectives of artists as part of its advocacy in pursuing art historical research and scholarship. With the collaboration of institutions, Duemila has mounted the retrospectives of Roberto M.A. Robles (Ateneo Art Gallery, 2011), Dudley Diaz (Vargas Museum, 2009), Julie Lluch Dalena (Cultural Center of the Philippines, 2008). It has also published a book on Diosdado Magno Lorenzo (National Library of the Philippines, 2009) and produced a major Pacita Abad exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, 2004. The gallery maintains close ties with museums throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States. Its futurist vision keeps it at the cutting-edge of Philippine art, making and archiving history as it happens.

SERVICES: CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION OF PAINTINGS, CONSULTANCY SERVICES, COMMISSIONS AND INSTALLATION

210 LORING ST. 1300 PASAY CITY, PHILIPPINES

MOBILE +63 908 307 9972

TEL

+63 8831 9990 / FAX +63 8833 9815

GDUEMILA@GMAIL.COM

ART@GALLERIADUEMILA.COM

WWW. GALLERIADUEMILA.COM

@GALLERIADUEMILA

Find us here: