MANILA, Philippines - It?s hard to run out of things to paint these days; it seems like what is bad is good for my creativity,? Buen Abrigo said more than a year ago on the occasion of his first solo exhibit.

Now, the young painter is singing a different tune. ?Sobrang hirap,? he confesses. ?Minsan dadaan ?yung mga araw na tinitingnan mo lang ?yung canvas. ?Di mo alam kung paano ka magsisimula. Sobrang nakakapagod.? (It was tough.)

Certainly, it cannot be said that life in these parts has suddenly grown all rosy, depriving artists of their requisite bleak inspiration. Neither can it be said that Abrigo?s creative well has run dry too soon. Call it his baptism of fire, his painful awakening to the reality that art is both agony and ecstasy.

Dual personality

Abrigo is as much an activist as he is an artist. A struggling painter by day and a renegade graffiti artist by night, he is the embodiment of the very dialectic he paints of.

The 21-year-old Fine Arts major at the University of the Philippines has yet to come to terms with his dual personae which he regards as extreme and unnecessary opposites.

And so he vacillates between these binaries, turning dead serious when talking about his paintings, and lighting up with mischief as soon as the subject of graffiti comes up.

?Ang laki kasi ng demand ng trabahong ito,? he complains. ?Hindi ako natutulog, tapos mula alas diyes ng umaga hanggang alas singko ng umaga, andito ka, nagpipinta.? (It's very demanding. I work late hours.)

At night, armed with aerosol and a restless imagination, he and a motley crew of kindred spirits roam the streets of Manila, peppering walls, bridges, and other public establishments with maggots and other images of decay. The city wakes the next morning and reacts with a mixture of contempt and awe.

More mature

Today, he returns to galerie e at the Serendra, for his second solo exhibit ?Enigma.?
The exhibit features 12 new paintings that reveal an artist at once humbled and tempered, made more mature by his inner conflicts and contradictions.

His brushwork is clean and certain, but his gift lies in his vision of art-as-text and of the canvas as a magic slate of meanings. This time, Abrigo, who once covered a car with cowhide for his undergraduate thesis, concentrates on building collages in mixed media, where pop icons, historical figures, ideologues, avant-gardes, starlets, Bolsheviks, geishas and comic-book heroes are re/appropriated and together make the strangest of bedfellows in fluid, hybridized narratives set against a landscape of industrial metal and concrete.

The resulting pastiche is both whimsical and intellectual, where each image is simultaneously de/recontextualized.

Polemical art

In ?The Physical Probability on the Near Death of Captain America,? Abrigo wheels out the popular American superhero on a hospital bed, sandwiched ominously in the foreground by a figure wearing a gas mask and a graffiti of the hammer and sickle in the background. Bomber planes hover above this landscape, completing the artist?s vision of the empire?s inevitable doom.

In ?Hypnotics,? he limns the vices and afflictions of consumerist culture. Three men smoke cigarettes against a backdrop of female portraits?a pinup, a geisha and a cowgirl. In the horizon, industrial chimneys billow toxic fumes.

Two years ago, when he was apprehended by the security guards of a big, private university as he was spray-painting graffiti on a footbridge used by the school?s co-eds, Abrigo was ordered to write a detailed incident report. Instead, he wrote a rambling manifesto, an artist?s statement of sorts.

?Hindi ito dumi,? he scribbled in that pseudo-treatise, telling the guards outright, ?Kasama kayo sa mga dapat tumingin nito.? The guards let him go.

In one of Abrigo?s images in the exhibit, the artist reveals the pseudonym with which he marks his graffiti projects, a bit of information valuable to anyone interested in prosecuting this graffiti artist for his growing body of public transgressions.
Any effort of such kind will inevitably prove futile. To enter Abrigo?s imagination, after all, is to surrender to his art.

?Enigma? runs Feb. 11-25 at e galerie, 2/F, The Shops at Serendra, Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. Call 9153840.