Toti Cerda *

Toti Cerda: About Face

Text by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

October 10, 2011 / E-4

Paintings of iconic-and dead-figures hang in Altro Mondo, a gallery centrally located in that luxury shopping haven, Greenbelt 5 in Makati City. Given their status and luminous names, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Gandhi, Bruce Lee, Jose Rizal, among others, may seem out of place in the hubbub of commerce marked with posters of pretty young things hawking anything from designer clothes to expensive travel trunks. And yet, if the artist of the exhibit titled I'll Do Anything for Peace and Freedom (on view until Oct. 16) is to believed, these icons are no different from the latter in that they also symbolically proffer a product the possibility of and aspiration for Utopia. 

Toti Cerda, whose long career in the art world has been characterized with paintings of lyrical streetside and countryside scenery full of children that seem to be immune from suffering, would be the first one to admit  that he's not one to delve into socio-realist strain. But something in him did change or more specifically occur a maturing vision and sensibility.