Philippine art as new bucket list

“Art in the Park” last March 23 was a heartwarming demonstration that Philippine contemporary art is appreciated by everyone who cares to look. And more people should look. One day, when people call to post photos of their art on Facebook in lieu of pictures of food, perhaps Filipinos will spontaneously post the work of their young countrymen instead of that of long dead Europeans.

Each year, the park in Makati’s Salcedo Village transforms into a bazaar of canvas. The mood is casual and welcoming, like strolling through Seoul’s Hongdae arts district, except that paintings dominate. Hundreds of small paintings make one cast off the mental burdens of everyday  routine for a morning.

A price maximum makes young artists the focus. This year, top universities set up stalls alongside Manila’s leading galleries (including my favorites Tin-Aw, Art Verite, Boston and nonprofit Canvas). Thumbing through stacked canvases to peek at pieces in the back is a novel experience. In the warm sun, one school laid out paintings in a long line on the parking lot floor. A group of the well-organized University of Santo Tomas undergraduates compared in nervous whispers whether any of their paintings had been purchased.

Studio 1616, a group of fresh graduates from the Technological University of the Philippines, stole the show by setting up their own stall and coming in force in matching T-shirts. Their 2×2-foot squares were visibly edgier, more striking, or more mysterious than the student works, and the side of their stall featured tiny unframed canvases hanging by bull clips. Their do-it-yourself sales force, led by Yeo Kaa with her tie-dyed hair, projected infectious energy and enthusiasm.

One could pick out the dedicated art collectors rushing from stall to stall to beat others to small paintings by famous artists and then to works by relative unknowns in the easily browsed ocean of small paintings. This year, some galleries also began selling prints from famous artists such as Bencab, Mark Justiniani, Joy Mallari and Elmer Borlongan.

Most attendees were curious people who never thought to visit an art exhibit before. Families leisurely went from stall to stall, surprising each other with what caught one’s fancy. Young and not-so-young couples seemed to enjoy the experience the most, methodically combing stalls for undiscovered gems, debating possible purchases, then proudly announcing where they were going to hang the new treasure they found together. It was funny to see potential customers unfamiliar with buying art interview art students unfamiliar with selling art.

I bought two of Art Verite’s paintings by Sangviaje, a very cerebral group of young Antipolo artists in their late twenties. The first was by Reynaldo “Pogs” Samson, one of the four Samson brothers. He makes his paintings look old, deceptively like ones from old churches. The small painting featured a dead Christ cradled by an astronaut, mimicking Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” with angels and spaceships flying overhead. One wonders whether science is burying faith or lamenting its loss in the modern world. Canvas head Gigo Alampay picked up another Pogs painting from Boston, this one featuring a bishop and a conquistador on a canoe, searching the landscape with telescopes in an allegory of the search for meaning. The eldest Samson, Jerson, had several canvases with dots of thickly applied paint in the shape of miniature Hershey Kisses that blended into walls of color viewed from afar, visibly intriguing passersby.

The second was by Japs Antido, who blends very short, inch-long strokes of bright colored paint into figures with amusing hints of the Philippines. It was an odd-shaped rectangular portrait of a lady with a birdhouse and twigs embedded in her exaggeratedly high Marge Simpson hair. The smiling lady in baro’t saya was nodding her head to earphones as colorful birds flew around her hair.

From Studio 1616, I pulled from a bull clip an extremely colorful collage of colors with hints of faces emerging. It was by Alee Garibay, a recent University of the Philippines graduate whose use of color in her fleeting faces from daydreams increasingly fascinates me. This took off from the Ayala Museum’s H.R. Ocampo exhibit, which convinced me that there is great beauty in art that discards form to focus purely on color.

I also had to patronize the impressive stall of Ilustrador ng Kabataan, the children’s-book artist group. Ben Reyna painted dreamlike scenes on small blocks of wood, and I chose “The Pretenders,” with a couple holding opera masks over each other’s face. Ben happily explained how his work is inspired by F. Sionil Jose novels.

Hundreds of park visitors are now telling guests to their homes about their cherished finds and the ecstatic young artists who sold them. As the economy grows, our society will hopefully embrace art as valuable to all.

Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium” is our country’s most important painting, yet it is a depiction of dead Roman gladiators to show Europe that the indios had learned to paint. Perhaps a young artist will produce a more distinctly Filipino masterpiece to ground our national identity.

Leaving Art in the Park, I wondered how much richer my life would be had I thought to ease the inane memory games of law school with quick jeepney rides to UP’s College of Fine Arts and met my peers there as students. In addition to trips to the pyramids and Machu Picchu, perhaps we should all add patronizing a young creative that one can grow old with to our bucket list.

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