MANILA, Philippines - The communal ground of natural observation, aesthetic simplification and emotional delineation upon which both Rico and Chachu Lascano thrive as partners in art, continues in the exhibition titled ?Mga Tilamsik ng Diwa at Barong Tagalog? (Reflections on the Barong Tagalog).
At the onset, both painter and poet agreed that there was a need to integrate the sophisticated Asian aesthetic of abstract minimalism and contemporary poetry with a Philippine mindset and conceptual context. However, instead of resorting to the oftentimes banal illustration of Philippine rural landscape and the florid frippery of romantic verse, the two decided to integrate their previous success of sublimation and suggestion to an oftentimes overlooked?but socially ubiquitous?aspect of Filipino life: the formal wear called the barong Tagalog.
The solution was to integrate the barong as both a visual aspect as well as a linguistic keyhole, through which one views and realizes our own attitudes and biases about art, life, and the everyday. Fifteen artworks by Rico explore this indigenous element through a minimalist white-on-white treatment, utilizing strips of barong material as beige-cream collage elements which he then lays in his trademark ?diagonal shard? motif (looking like blades of grass growing on an empty field). White paint is then interspersed with this fabric material, and with dramatic, cursive-like strokes of charcoal pencil. An interesting new element is the mesh pattern of diagonal fibers that result in a visual cross-hatch, like wayward pieces of latticed hedgerows floating in a sea of milk.
One is reminded of the sublimity of minimalist Filipino landscape, such as those by Phillip Victor and National Artist Jose Joya, in Rico?s new work. This linkage is more than casual: Rico studied under Joya. More importantly Chachu?s haiku poetry, here reconfigured into the rhymed metrical form of the Bulakeño duplon (which is the foundation of the famed balagtasan), resituates Rico?s abstractions as a modernist declaration of national import. Chachu?s poems explore the various avatars through which the barong manifest itself as part of the everyday experience of ordinary Filipinos: the pompous status symbol for the politician-cum-godfather; the de rigeur wear for defining life rituals like baptisms, first communions, graduations, weddings, and funerals; the delicacy of social and economic relations and obligations that weave the barong into our communal fabric; and the comings, goings, and staying-ins of people who have to reckon with the barong as a cipher of belonging.
By resuscitating the lowly and ignored fabric of the special everyday like the barong, Rico and Chachu Lascano point back to a revered tradition of native thematic appropriation by Filipino Modernists, from Vicente Manansala and Jose Joya to Ang Kiukok, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Benedicto Cabrera, and Abdumari Imao. The difference this time is that this current appropriation ennobles the culture and the people animating it, so that we in the audience would also realize the need to change our mindset about treating, and re-threading, the lives we take for granted.
The exhibit will run Oct. 28 - Nov. 9 at the Crucible Gallery, L/4, Bldg. A, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City. Tel.No. 635-6061.
