Jerome Choco

CHOCO’S RHAPSODIES 

By Sara Grace C. Fojas

December 30, 2019 / C-3 

Multi-talented young art­ist Jerome Choco likes to express his love for music not only through his beloved instruments but on a white canvas, with Rembrandt and Caravaggio as his bandmates. 

“Art, for me, is like a musical piece that I need to play by note and melody in order to give it a soul so that the viewers would also feel what I felt when I was creating it,” he says. “I want them to also hear my music through my art.” 

His exhibit “Transposition II,” in cooperation with Nova Art Gallery, is inspired by the Dutch painter Rem­brandt and Italian painter Caravaggio. “I carefully studied their lighting, colors, and honed my skills in creating hyperrealism in my art piece. I started with a concept in mind—minsan naiisip ko na lang bigla habang nag-paparada ang banda, nagbibisikleta, o nakasakay sa jeep (Sometimes it just occurs to me while the band is marching, while biking, or while I’m in jeep),” Choco says. “Then, it’s time for a photoshoot. After that, I will apply it on canvas. Habang ginagawa ko ito, dito lumalabas ang maraming layers at stories ng isang piyesa, ang kuwento ng isang banda, ng sarili ko, o ng society. Inspirasyon ko sa paggawa ang mga mahal ko sa buhay at ang mga pangarap ko na nakaugnay dito (While I do this, the many layers and stories of a piece come out—the story of a band, of myself, or of society. My inspiration is my loved ones and my hopes for them).” 

At 27 years old, Choco’s love to ex­pore different styles, through Google and the magic of the internet, has honed his skills as a hyperrealist. His interest in art started when he was in high school at the Regional Pilot School for the Arts in Angono, Rizal where he first learned about drawing and different art mediums. As a stu­dent who loves art and music, money was scarce and he could not afford the instruments and materials. But the generosity of his classmates and friends helped him through it. 

“I stopped studying for a year, before going to college, because of financial problems,” he says. “Dur­ing that year, I could say that I honed my skills more because I would draw and paint every day. It was also that time when I joined a contemporary art group in Angono, the Neo-Angono Artists Collective, and I joined a marching bad.” 

At the Neo-Angono Artists Col­lective, Choco met his mentor, the hyperrealist Wire Tuazon who guided him in developing his skills. “My still now varies,” he says. “I can say that I’m still in the process of experimen­tation and discovery, but my themes and concepts all have something to do with a marching band and with music, because playing instruments is one of my hobbies. I’ve started to perfect my skills in hyperrealism. Now I apply the colors of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, just like in my ‘Transposition I’ and ‘Transposition II’ exhibits at Galerie Stephanie and the Nova Art Gallery, respectively. I am able to show dif­ferent emotions in my artworks and that makes me happy.”

 

Now, Choco works in a makeshift studio in Angono—an old classroom transformed into a museum of his and his co-artists’ masterpieces. It is here where he continues de­veloping his style and, soon, his masterpieces will likeley be seen and known by more galleries in Manila. This 2020, he plans on exploring his talents even more. 

“I realized that my art evolved fast, perhaps because of my continuous exploration and experimentation with various styles. This 2020, I plan to rest from solo shows and to focus on myself. I will do first what I really like to do on a canvas and, when the time is right, I will put them out there,” he says. “I realize that I have been fortunate to have had many deadlines for various shows or galleries, but I’m even more lucky to have time to work on my own art—the kind that’s wala lang, I just want to do it because it makes me happy. I think it is here that I am able to put out what’s truly in my heart. I am looking forward to the coming years for my artworks to be even happier and freer.” 

‘Transposition II’ runs until Jan. 4 at Warehouse 12, A La Fuerza Compound, Don Chino Roces Avenue, Makati City. | 632 659 3697 

Billy Bagtas

 

MONSTERS UNDER YOUR BED 

By Terence Repelente

Billy Bagtas’ first solo exhibition is, for him, close to home. Its concept is literally about his home and family. Not really that literal, though. In “God Bless Our Home,” the young, emerging artist welcomes us to his household using artworks that depict horrific and unsettling figures. 

These cryptid-like imageries, which are present in almost all of Bagtas’ works even before the debut solo exhibition, seem like a recurring signature. According to him, this gravitation toward that dark and eerie style started when he had an unusual sickness in college. “Maraming beses sinugod ako sa ospital (I was rushed to the hospital many times), but they couldn’t accurately identify what it was. No findings at all,” he said. 

Because of this, Bagtas’ parents, who were born and raised in the countryside, resorted to faith healers. “Yung una sabi lamanlupa, ‘yung pangalawa sabi nakulam, at ‘yung huli sabi demonic attack (The first one claimed it was a gnome, the second one said it was a curse, and the third one said it was a demonic attack),” he said. Whatever it was, the weird illness represented a dark chapter in Bagtas’ life, resulting to a failed romantic relationship and even leading to him attempting to take his own life. 

But eventually, he found his way back through religious faith and, of course, art. In 2015, when he was just beginning to take art more seriously as a career, he recalled seeing Jaime de Guzman’s work Gomburza Mar-tyrs during the Pasinaya event at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. “Kinain ng work ni sir Jaime ‘yung kaluluwa ko (Sir Jaime’s work devoured my soul),” he said. “Simula noon mas naging matapang pa ako sa mga piyesa at mas naging honest (After that encounter, I became braver and more honest in my works).” 

Since then, bravery and honesty became the driving force of Bagtas’ artistic pursuits. These two elements are evident in “God Bless Our Home” as he courageously tells brutally honest stories about his life and family, including personal narratives about a surprise pregnancy, infidelity, a complicated relationship with his father, and other sensitive issues. In Sa Pag-iyak at Pagtanggap, Bagtas conjures various cryptid-like creatures, positioned as if they are posing for a family photo. 

“Yung pinapakita ko sa art ko ay laging balanse (In my art, I always show balance),” he said. “Kahit hindi kanais-nais sa mata, gusto ko pa rin malaman nila ‘yung loob ng piyesa (Even if it’s not pleasing to the eyes, I still want the viewer to explore the work).” Bagtas believes that all art has in them some sort of depth that needs to be shown and explored. Moreover, for him, the artist, in creating art, carves himself open and lets the viewer decide whether they want to go deeper or not. 

In many ways, “God Bless Our Home,” is Bagtas splitting himself wide, wide open, in visceral detail. The exhibition, however, does not just successfully draw you into the artist’s life through haunting images. It also invites you to confront your personal horrors: the ghosts of your past, the apparitions of your traumas, and the monsters under your bed. 

The exhibition does not just successfully draw you into the artist’s life. It also invites you to confront your personal demons: the ghosts of your past, the apparitions of your traumas, and the monsters under your bed. 

Randalf Dilla

 

Exorcising The Ghosts In Randalf Dilla’s Art

Published October 5, 2020

by Terrence Repelente

At its surface, Randalf Dilla’s ongoing show at the Art Cube Gallery, “Exquisite Derangements,” seems to celebrate the connection between the artist and his audience. Through meticulously rendered hyper-realistic pieces—a signature of Dilla—the exhibition purports itself as a sort of meta commentary on art spaces such as museums and galleries. In the exhibition note, these spaces are likened to “the secular temple in which people encounter works of art that move them in all sorts of ways.” Such encounters for some individuals are like religious transformations. As stated by the note author Carlomar Daona, “What are, in reality, silent, inert objects become powerful conveyors of thoughts, feelings, and ideas, enacting a powerful transference between the artist, the medium, and the viewer that transcends time itself.” 

Dilla perfectly illustrates this image of congregation in Transference, which depicts a group of people standing in front of an artwork in what seems to be an art gallery and, on the other side, an artist in his studio. Dividing the artist and the audience in the work are the frame, the smartphones, and the spatial difference. The work, according to Dilla, signifies the struggle of being an artist. “It symbolizes the attempt to pour emotion and idea into the canvas,” he says. “It symbolizes the artist’s perseverance in creating a masterpiece.”

As an artist, Dilla has indeed consistently showcased this masterful technique of transcending the conventions of realism. In fact, he calls his style “hypersurrealism,” a marriage between the extreme and accurate figurations of hyperrealism and the dreaminess of surrealism. And for Daoana, this brings out the “vital relationship between the artist and his audience, as mediated by the physical medium of art.”

There is, however, something more to this exhibition than just the typical, worn out abstraction of the artist-audience relationship. Something strange, eerie and, I would say, “hauntological,” which might explain this “struggle” Dilla speaks of. Hauntology, a neologism and concept coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Specters of Marx, pertains to elements from the past that persistently reappear and, like a ghost, haunt our present. The late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who revived the term, more specifically placed hauntology as a characterization of aesthetics and culture under the dominance of late capitalism—and, by extension, neoliberalism—where individuals are confronted with a “cultural impasse: the failure of the future.” 

“More broadly, and more troublingly,” Fisher wrote, “the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system.”

This is a horrifying picture of the Philippine art collecting class, the living ghosts of our backward semi-feudal and semi-colonial society, the architects of our uncertain future.

Interestingly, when asked about what being an artist means to him, Dilla is concerned with being part of human history. “As with how we currently study the artworks done in the past, in the future, our masterpieces will define our time,” he says.  

In his writings about hauntology, Fisher echoed the arguments of Derrida that the hauntological was best described by a quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “a time out of joint.” This shattered sense of time is conveyed in cultural pieces characterized by pastiche, repetition, refurbishment, and nostalgia, symptomatic of an uncertain present and a disappearing future or, as Fisher wrote, the “inability to imagine anything other than the past, the incapacity to generate forms that can engage with the present, still less the future.” In the work Visitors, which even Daoana, in his exhibition note, defines as “possessing an indescribable energy,” Dilla presents an image of two young museum-goers in contemporary clothing admiring a painting of horses that was, as Daoana observes, created decades ago, and that appears as if it was inspired by the works of 18th century English painter George Stubbs. In another work, Assimilation, Dilla directly appropriates or, should I say, takes inspiration from Christina, the muse of American painter Andrew Wyeth in Christina’s World, one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century.

Following American literary critic Frederic Jameson, Fisher believes that postmodernism (or the cultural logic of late capitalism) is “characterized by a particular kind of anachronism.” One particular example toward which both theorists gravitate is The Shining. A horror film where most of the unnerving scenes and elements, Fisher argues, are derived from the foregrounding of anachronism, such as Jack, the main character, smiling from the center of a 1920s photograph. 

Similarly, albeit unconsciously, Dilla demonstrates this sort of anachronism in most of the works in the exhibition. In Unearthed, which is depicted to be set inside a museum with interiors emulating Greek architecture, he attempts to pay tribute to works from classical antiquity, which, hauntologically, “are yet to be discovered.” Here, Dilla situates a past and a nostalgia (Greek architectural elements and sculptures) that are not his and juxtaposes it with an unknown, undiscovered, or yet-to-be discovered, entity.

The point, however, is not to single out Dilla. “Exquisite Derangements,” is only an example of our wider and ever-growing interest and enthusiasm to hauntingly relive our past and even the past of different cultures (which may be rooted from years of imperialist exploitation and attack on culture) than to imagine new futures. Filipino film and media critic Jeffrey Deyto writes in his essay Birthdays @ Permanent Midnight: Hallyu, Time-Travel, and Good Vibes in Dystopia: “The jouissance of reliving the time has become a general encounter of everyday lives.”  

Finally, in The Art Collector, Dilla conjures an entity scarier than any ghost, one that is still alive and among us. The work veers away from the artist-audience rhetoric and focuses on the reproduction of the patron-artist relationship. Unsurprisingly, in his exhibition note, Daoana describes the work as a “homage to the patronage of the collectors who, because of their assiduous purchases, create their own private museums for others to enjoy.” 

The Art Collector, however, is presented as an unsettling image. At a hall of a museum is a group of arms, sleeved with what looks like an expensive suit, signifying a class that is above every other figure depicted in the works, pointing fingers at different directions, unleashing a swarm of money paper planes. Below them, the floor collapses into the void. This is not a homage to the patronage of the collectors. This is a horrifying picture of the Philippine art collecting class that is composed mostly of big comprador bourgeoisie and landlords. The living ghosts of our backward semi-feudal and semi-colonial society. The architects of our uncertain future.

“Exquisite Derangements” runs until Oct. 10 at the Art Cube Gallery

Philipp Ines

 

Resurrecting Heroes

November 26, 2018 / C-3 

By Hannah Jo Uy

Acts of heroism in the face of danger, the unconquerable spirit of mankind in the midst of warfare and the neverend­ing battle between good and evil taken up by the courageous few that want to serve their country—for artist Philipp Ines, the morals and values celebrated by epic poems that tell of such stories are more valuable today than ever be­fore, with the artist lamenting the fad­ing sense of nationalism among the Filipino people today. 

Through his works, Ines unravels the hidden treasures that have been buried in modern society’s assault of the senses to put the spotlight on stories that embody the cultural. His propensity to promote the beauty of shared consciousness is even more pronounced in his latest show, “Isto- Istorya,” currently being showcased at Art Verite. In his latest collection, Ines indulged in his deep fascination for Fil­ipino myths, legends, and folklore, div­ing into the rich tapestry of stories that emulate the collective beliefs of our people. “I feel that we have a rich oral tradition,” he said. “I want to introduce the visual version of those to today’s art audience because there are still so many things to discover.” 

Speaking on the biggest driv­ing force behind the collection, Ines pointed to Biagni Lam-ang, an epic poem close to the artist’s heart having grown up in Cabugao, Ilocos Sur. Ines recalled being witness to the spirit of community in his town, hearing from elders speak of Lam-ang. “Because of that I became interested in creating visual representations of these epics so more people can know more about our heroes,” he said. Ines built upon his knowledge by reading up on similar stories such the Bicolano epic of Iba­lon and Maguindanao’s Indarapatra at Sulayman, which also highlight the value of heroism and community. “Be­cause of my knowledge of the values in these stories, I was able to compare the level of patriotism then to now. And it would seem that, little by little, our sense of nationality is fading away, we are becoming more concerned with our own selves,” he said.

 For Ines, creativity is the amalga­mation of life, with all the experiences gained and lessons learned. “As an art­ist, I take it upon myself to create my works out of what I see,” he said, “and what I imagine based on the things that are happening around me.” 

Ines’ keen eye for observation serves as his very education, and the seeds of his oeuvre. “I keep track of all my ideas,” he admitted. “I have studies, and plans on what to paint beforehand.” 

Speaking on his creative process, Ines shared that he always starts with a cup of coffee. Armed with a fresh brew, Ines steps into his work space, an in­timate womb that cultivates his latest visual creations. “I may have one piece on my easel that I am focusing on and other blank canvases which I can eas­ily reach, once I have a different idea of what to paint,” he shared.That being said, Ines manages to strike an essen­tial balance of having both a methodi­cal and a spontaneous approach. For the most part, the works of Ines reflect his personal concerns towards society, using art as a way to react to news and current events. This, for the artist, sig­nals his foray deeper into his craft. “I feel like I have evolved by dealing with serious issues ailing society, and I also managed to refine my painting tech­nique over the years,” he said. 

This ever-evolving technique is also deeply influenced by the intense and spirited approach of Jackson Pol­lock, Egon Schiele, and Claude Mo­net, which the artist credits as having had the biggest impact on his aes­thetic approach. The works of Ines echo the same vibrancy, pulsating with life, raw feelings, and emotions. It is almost of pro­found irony the medium tasked with bearing such passion is paper. It is through this medium, in all its humility, that Ines attempts to com­municate the inner workings of his mind, drawn to the flexibility that paper offers as it allows him to go as detailed as pos­sible with the work at hand.“Whether it’s an intermediate sort with the blue and red lines, or flattened cardboard that look like a box flattened out, I always use it as ground for my paint­ings,” he said, “be­cause I feel like this is an object that is uni­versal and recogniz­able to everyone.” 

Indeed, as a painter, Ines has tak­en it upon himself to resurrect heroes in the earnest desire to use his visual me­dium to underscore their importance in the formation of the Filipino conscious­ness, using epic narratives as a meta­phor to filter his message on the im­portance of bayanihan. 

“Isto-istorya” by Philipp Ines, is on display at Art Verite Galleryfrom Nov.17 to 29, 2018.