Young artists’ quest to make art public

I sat with painter Manny Garibay at the back of UP’s Vargas Museum last October. Showcasing his fascinating texture, colors and ability to pluck satire from everyday life, his show “Sa Ngalan ng Batas” depicts a youth in a singlet crossing the street at the wrong place while texting, a faceless bureaucrat casually being handed a sealed envelope, and a law student poring over his books, so self-absorbed he forgets the community around him.

Our favorite, the silently powerful “Lumang Larawan,” depicts a middle-aged man in a barong with an imperious pose, sitting in a large chair with his child self in a matching pose and barong sitting on his knee, and a portrait of his elderly self, still with the same expression, beside them. Behind them is a large seal of office, all in a palette drab, monotonous and changeless by Manny standards.

Manny, however, was restless.

He wanted to provoke more reflection than any single exhibit could. He articulated a grand vision shared with other alums to transform UP’s sprawling open spaces into a gigantic canvas. Thus, Manny, his daughter Alee acting as coordinator and enforcer, dozens of idealistic young artists and UP Law professor Gigo Alampay’s Canvas nonprofit launched Project Bakawan (or mangrove), a public art initiative to promote environmental awareness.

One Sunday, Jaypee Samson, a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ prestigious Thirteen Artists award for young artists, told me to pass by Vargas. I found his Antipolo-based Sangviaje, artists in their late 20s and early 30s, gathered beside the academic oval road. They were finishing a 12-foot mural under the setting sun as curious joggers ambled past. Jaypee, deemed the group’s best figurative painter, was elected to paint the main figures, snorkelers diving down into schools of fish (and added his self-portrait for his trouble). Given the one-day time frame, Jaypee swapped his trademark thickly applied, highly textured oil paint for quicker drying acrylics. His brother Pogs, 2010 winner of Metrobank’s long-running art contest, playfully added a Beatles yellow submarine. (Jerson and Julius, the two older Samson painter-brothers, made no cameo this time.) Their cousin, Edrick Daniel, painted the human heart in the seascape’s center, and Japs Antido surrounded it with intermingled arteries and mangrove roots. Joven Mansit transformed the end of one root into a human spine and skeleton. He added a man wearing a turtle shell, while Dennis Fortozo added a man with balloons. Guerrero Habulan prepared the deceptively simple background, and he and Daniel Aligaen added geometric shapes familiar from their usual work.

Japs dubbed the mural “Habitat,” “where different organisms live and struggle for survival.” They left it to dry beside the night guard and drew lots for who would come back to glaze it. Then we were off to Maginhawa Street for celebratory drinks. Two weeks later, two more one-day murals were painted at the academic oval by Studio 1616, recent Technological University of the Philippines graduates, and a group from Manny’s Artletics seminars.

Manny’s own team painted in style in the middle of the UP Lantern Parade, on the back of a truck with Joey Ayala rocking away beside them. Salingpusa, now in their 50s and touted as future national artists, form the core of Antipolo’s Pinto museum and are Sangviaje’s mentors. Andres Bonifacio emerged from the canvas, wading through chest-high flood, resiliently carrying a bamboo pole with a red banner. The mural began as deep UP maroon outlines, then the face began to evoke Mark Justiniani’s early works (and Mark got a haircut for the occasion). Joining them were Salingpusas Joy Mallari, Ferdie Montemayor and John Santos III, plus Rodel Tapaya, Leslie de Chavez, Renz Baluyot and Alee. The future masters’ collaboration is expected to be reexhibited in Art Fair Philippines in February.

Increasingly prominent auctions leave artists frustrated, threatening to sideline the quest to capture the public psyche and eternalize a generation’s values and aspirations. Bakawan, Manny summed up, aims “for artists to connect with society in ways that can be more authentic” perhaps because of sentiment “that the art market changed the motivations of many artists, especially the younger ones.” Alee hopes to “engage artists to fulfill their roles as cultural engineers,” to keep faith with duty to society. Debating with street artist and “dolphin guy” AG Saño, I found myself wishing that Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium” would be dethroned as the Filipino painting most familiar to Filipinos. It proved to Europeans that Indios can paint but its symbolism has no relevance to our generation, and neither do Fernando Amorsolo’s idyllic scenes of a rural Philippines that may no longer exist.

How beautiful it would be if the art of today spilled out from the galleries and onto notebooks, jeepneys, ATM cards and T-shirts. If art expands from our corporate lobbies—St. Luke’s Global City’s corridors have several Salingpusa and Jerson Samson works, and Tessie Sy-Coson’s BDO elevator lobby has the most striking Botong Francisco after the murals now in the National Museum—into our schools and parks, the way Anton del Castillo’s oversized metal jack stones just turned the Ateneo de Manila lawns into a seeming giant’s playground. If, parallel to Harvard’s Langdell law library, future UP Law students might find respite in a Garibay or a Samson amidst bookshelves, reminding: “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

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