Antipolo through painters’ eyes

Life’s most fascinating encounters happen by chance.

I was walking out of Greenbelt with heavy packages when someone offered to help me. He turned out to be Jerson Samson, a painter who was my contemporary at the University of the Philippines and who had just raced down from Antipolo on a motorcycle to Ayala Museum to make a submission before it closed. Over a beer, we had the first of many conversations on how “martial law babies” express their still uncertain place in the world.

Jerson, for example, is passionate about the Reproductive Health Act, emotion stoked by walks around his humble corner of Antipolo. He made a name for himself painting cutaways of houses that reveal a Philippine neighborhood’s typical scenes: a house altar, a street-corner basketball ring, a family huddled around an old TV set, and the huge wooden spoon and fork hanging on the living room wall. When I mentioned I was writing on the bizarre legal challenge against the RH Act, he confided that he had poured his frustrations into a painting that art gallery owners told him not to bother finishing. “Sona” (State of the Nation Address)  distorted his carefree murals into tormented depictions of Filipinos squeezed into shanties with no more living space. Commentary flows in subtle details: the figures’ crowns of thorns, the red, blue and yellow palette, and Malacañang Palace in the horizon (Sona was painted over three years, during staunchly anti-RH President Gloria Arroyo’s term).

I found myself at UP’s Vargas Museum Café with Jerson and Prof. Randy David, discussing artistic integrity and the legitimacy of being an observer. Randy related how he decided not to run against Arroyo for a congressional seat so as not to irrevocably compromise his position as a commentator and academic by entering politics. Jerson shared how he hacked his dead pet bayawak (monitor lizard) and used the blood to paint, impressing the late fine arts professor Roberto Chabet. As Randy spoke of the importance of an artist staying true to himself for society’s and his sake, Jerson seemed to stare into space, reflecting on how to translate words into images.

Jerson described how he watched passing penitents as a child, their whips leaving their backs a bloody mess. He followed them to the neighborhood poso (water well) where they washed their wounds. He uses cross-carrying penitents as devices, from a signal that a painting depicts Antipolo to a proposition that religious zealotry might create its own burden.

Jerson taught his three brothers—Reynaldo, Julius and Jaypee—how to paint, and they collected every major art award among them. Jaypee, the youngest, is a Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artists awardee who paints Antipolo’s denizens in extremely thick strokes. He discards traditional concepts of lighting, perspective and composition, emphasizing the subjects who stand plainly as though for a snapshot. But there is more than meets the eye. “Uniporme” depicts a large, scruffy, shirtless man about to swing a softball bat. It was inspired by an alleged neighborhood drug pusher who also had a reputation for being kind to children and playing softball with them. “Dora the Explorer” depicts a child scavenging in a garbage dump wearing a Dora blouse. Staring at the innocent face, one realizes her explorations are not as exotic as the cartoon Dora’s.

Julius is a fine arts professor who enjoys large murals with a hint of the fantastic: crocodile-headed greedy men, capitalists in suits with skyscrapers for heads, and street urchins with the graduation togas they dream of floating above them. One series replaces people’s heads with exposed brains as a device to paint the objects that occupy their minds around them. “Banal na Aso” depicts a dog in heat in a priest’s cassock, with the brain surrounded by naked women. Asked why he chose this subject given that he is the most devout of the brothers, he smiled wryly and posited that a critical painting depicting God might be blasphemy, but a critical painting depicting the Church is social commentary.

Their parents dissuaded Reynaldo or “Pogs” from taking up painting, but he joined his brothers after winning Metrobank’s prestigious art contest in 2010. His works are made to resemble cracked, faded paintings in old churches and explore religion and conflict. He uses angels and astronauts as devices for faith and reason. One exploration depicted the Black Nazarene and Vishnu as Godzilla-like figures, towering over the angels and astronauts’ war-torn land. Perhaps his most enigmatic is “Never-ending search for the inconceivable heavens,” a crucified Christ with astronauts raising vinegar to his lips and catching the blood that flowed from the wound in his side. The viewer is left to reflect whether the artist means that religion must be slain for science to advance, or religion’s death on the supposed path to modernity is our generation’s great tragedy.

Exploring Philippine art has been a fascinating way of reexploring the country. Fernando Amorsolo’s idyllic rural scenes have long given way to the anonymity of the metropolis and of technology. The powerful protest art during martial law has been superseded by more subtle but no less critical deconstructions of more abstract ideas and social trends. I have no idea what our children will immortalize as the art of our time, but it will be fascinating to progress on my own intellectual journey as a writer by following the Samson brothers’ evolution as visual artists.

Oscar Franklin Tan (@oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan) cochairs the Philippine Bar Association Committee on Constitutional Law and teaches at the University of the East.