MANILA, Philippines - When newspaper illustrator Esmeraldo Z. Izon came out with the collection of his Philippines Free Press works, one cannot help but be amused with the eloquent way our history is told, albeit not in polemic, but in cartoons.

The forthrightness of Izon?s cartoons, according to journalist Teodoro Locsin Jr., serves as the readers? sharp moral sense that reckons with the contradictions of their colonial experience and evokes a future replete with hope and reforms.

But looking back at Izon?s works, along with those of Jorge Pineda?s, Jose Pereira?s and Ireneo Miranda?s, one wonders if change, indeed, has taken place.

Unfortunately, our artists still find reasons to depict critically our repressive conditions and inane pathetic mistakes.

One such artist in this satiric tradition is Rodie Julian as shown in his latest exhibit at Choice Expression in Makati, ?Larong Pambata? (Children?s Games).

The collection blends the tradition of folk art with our unique tradition of satire in which Julian takes art to the level of critique. The works may depict innocent children playing, but actually the tots and their games become potent symbols and allegories of our political situation today.

In ?Mangingisda? (The Fishermen), the children may be fishing, but they point directly to the nation?s inability to ?fish out? the truth from the political scandals the country has experienced over the past years. Julian can be accused of vulgar literalism here, but his keen political sense only proves art is an ideological tool that can serve the pursuit both of pleasure and of truth.

Julian may have been influenced by his association with Angono artists known for their austere realism. But here, he tries to be singular in appropriating the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, a technique that employs the language and forms of carnival only to reveal in the end that the very language and games are actually a moral inversion of an established order.

Show and tell

?Luksong-Tinik? (Jumping over a Thorny Fence) and ?Moro-Moro? (Christians versus Moors), for instance, become the most apt renditions of such a moral inversion where politics as seen from the perspective of these children becomes shows that adults like us mount and then everyone in the mise en scene, including the spectators, becomes a pawn lost in the revelry.

Julian?s colorful landscapes and backgrounds betray lyricism and Romanticism. He wants to show that nothing is what it seems to be, something is always amiss.

The use of children and their games is a strategy for the artist to articulate what has been repressed. After all, Freud tells us nothing is really accidental, even jokes are related to the formation of the unconscious.

Here, the artist tries to present to us some unresolved conflicts that have congealed and repressed for so long in our memory, and with these works we are again asked to confront the horrors that have been plaguing us.

Julian is not necessarily alone in this crusade, as his paintings also reveal that the true test of all our undertakings practically stand in front of us: our children. A society that concerns itself with the welfare of its children and youth is a society that has a future.

For Julian, perhaps criticism against any institution should always be seen as a genuine attempt to preserve and fight for the future.

?Larong Pambata? opens today in Choice Expression Gallery, 2/F Doña Consolacion Bldg., 122 Jupiter St., Bel-Air, Makati City. Call 899-0718.