Kawayan de Guia’s extraordinary portraits
http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/lifestyle/lifestyle/view_article.php...
Kawayan De Guia's "Incubator was an exhibit of his personal inspirations, which included Santiago Bose.
Below is the article from the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Kawayan de Guia’s extraordinary portraits
MANILA, Philippines
-- An unusual take on portraiture is displayed in Kawayan Thor de
Guia’s latest exhibit, “Incubator,” nine pieces in mixed media on
canvas, until Aug. 19 in The Drawing Room, Metrostar Building, 1007
Metropolitan Ave., Makati.
These are portraits of well-known Filipino artists, but De Guia has
chosen not to portray their superficial features, or even the
personality revealed by physiognomy or gesture, and instead depict
their respective creative process, how they are nourished by their art
and what constitute their art-making.
He has selected artists he acknowledges as his mentors, those who
have helped him in his art-making and influenced his art: Bencab, Santiago Bose, Roberto Villanueva, Rene Aquitania, Agnes Arellano, Tommy Hufalla and his father Kidlat Tahimik.
The series is invariably rendered in flat tones of brown, gray,
slate-green, slate-blue, white, with the occasional pink, orange,
ox-blood. Some are collaged with cutouts of photo prints and images
from textbooks and magazines, wooden slats, textile. The title of each
piece is scribbled in pencil directly on the white gallery wall, with a
symbol associated with the artist.
De Guia uses the image of the room as framework for composition,
assigning each to an artist and filling it up with cultural
bric-à-brac. The result is a merry mix of Surrealism and Expressionism,
each canvas a veritable treasure-trove of ethnic, Western and Oriental
artifacts.
Spectral presence
Thus, the room assigned to sculptor Arellano, with a hand symbol, is
clogged with what appear to be graven images from Buddhist temples or
the “Kama Sutra,” a mirror on the wall, the Byzantine ikon of the
Mother of Perpetual Help, a gigantic sacred lotus in lieu of a ceiling
fan. Arranged symmetrically on the ceiling is the iconic image of a
pair of female breasts with one being fingered, the nipples staring
down like gigantic eyeballs.
Villanueva’s room, with a zigzagging-construction symbol, has a
parade of bulol and part of his bamboo installation bridging to a cloud
against a sky of midnight blue. Aquitania’s, with the symbol of a
bulol’s profile and a seedling, has a giant moth, a cherub, St.
Sebastian, a black doglike creature, anatomical vivisections.
Bencab’s, with a seedling symbol, has line drawings of giant white
alarm clocks fixed on the wall, a sofa, a broom, a hornbill, a crow,
his iconic earth-toned image of Filipino women in baro’t saya.
Bose’s room, with the lit-candle symbol, is dominated by a torn
Philippine flag hung vertically as room partition or doorway, Rizal in
coat drawn with angel wings, the Katipunan flag, the Venus de Milo
fallen on the ground with an American cavalryman shooting at its womb,
a palm frond, a wire-mesh cage containing human bones and a skull.
Scattered are inscriptions that read: Dahil rebolusyon ang bala ng
pag-ibig ko, Twilight on trial and The revolution gets bought, the
revolution gets made.
The artists’ presence in the rooms is not central to the imagery, as
it is often spectral, like Bencab and Kidlat, or peripheral, as with
Villanueva squatting among tree branches like a kapre.
Veritable self-portraits
The exhibit’s title, in fact, refers to the artist’s room, where art
is being nurtured and hatched. How deeply these mentors have entered De
Guia’s life can be gleaned from the contents of each room.
Yet these paintings go beyond being tributes to those artists as
they’re also revelatory of the consciousness and state of feeling of
the artist himself. In which case, each piece can also serve as
self-portrait.
As he himself admits: “I always felt like I was absorbing more than
just their craft or techniques but also their beliefs, their thoughts,
their stand in life. After a while it’s like you become Rene or Agnes
because you start to think like them. Then you realize you’re not.
You’re you. But then each of them has given me a pillar, which is part
of who I am now.”
In fact, one of these pieces is an acknowledged self-portrait: “Room
#9: Ako (Kawayan de Guia).” Segmented in planes of green, slate-blue
and brown, the room is filled with white silhouettes and linear
drawings of a man in various attitudes, the flooring of pine slats
glued on the canvas, and the title on the wall doodled with what else?
but a bamboo.
De Guia won the Juror’s Choice in the Asean Art Awards in Bangkok
three years ago. He is only 28 but he demonstrates maturity in outlook
as person and artist.
His art reveals a mind that has absorbed Oriental philosophy, cultic hagiography and deep nationalism.
- Login to post comments