I FIND nothing that aspires to the topical in Farley del Rosario?s work. Instead, I find critical irony, some of it self-mocking and part of it directed at our concepts of artmaking, brought to life and sustained in his recent exhibit, ?Dreamworx.?

Ever since Lito Zulueta?s declaration over a year ago that Del Rosario?s ?cartoonish naïf art in beautiful lambent colors has intrigued and become the rage of the [local] art world? (Inquirer 10/22/07), the temptation has been strong to see his work as a highly promising local effort in the revival and renewal of the distinctly 20th-century charge of the pictorial movement called art naïf, known in other extreme cases as the proper-named ?Naïve art? (with the obligatory caps) or even oxymoronically as ?art of the modern primitives.?

It is certainly easy to see familiar and various Naïve motifs, techniques and styles in most, if not all, the oil-acrylic canvas paintings and mixed-media pieces featured in his recently concluded solo exhibit at Art Exchange Gallery (Level 3, Glorietta 4, Makati City. Call 752-9089 or text 0917-3296273 for further details).

In something like the oil-acrylic ?Kettle and Hide? or the mixed-media ?Hanging Sequence,? the decorative touch, the homage to folk art and crafts traditions characteristic of some Naïve art especially in its early incarnations, is meticulously suggested in the riotous profusion and schematic distribution of simple shapes and vivid but contrapuntal color patterns across and in excess of artifactual object (kettles) and scenic space (sylvan nook).

Primitive exercise

Against their backdrop, both grounds?the object in one and the scenic in the other?recapitulate, rather dramatically, what one writer called the ?illogicalities in form and space? characteristic of much Naïve work.

Even human figuration in both pieces, as in all the others (save for one where it does not occur, the oil-acrylic on wood ?New Order?), is hired in the service of the ornamental or accessorial, almost like mere pretexts for the exercises of primitive creativity and childlike artistic freedom valorized by practitioners of the movement.

Del Rosario?s ?strange figures? are certainly in the foreground of oil-acrylic canvases like ?Airconditioning,? ?Obedience Training,? and ?Out in the Middle,? and the mixed-media ?Chillin? Out,? with their ?vintage string necks that seem to transform the heads into kites? (Zulueta?s descriptions, from a review of another exhibition by the artist in 2006, ?At Play,? but just as applicable here).

The ?lightsomeness of the figures? which, according to Zulueta, transforms into ?lithesome lines? to create the space for full-color complementation, some startling contrasts, even unlikely harmonies with background and other visual elements, the critic then can read as signifying the ?magical spirit, the joyous quality? so temperamentally dear to the Naïve artist.

For Zulueta, the ?deceptively simple? work and figuration of Del Rosario is full of ?impish charm? (critic Jae Jalandoni-Robillos prefers to describe Del Rosario?s charm as ?guileless?) and it is deceptive and impish because it otherwise masks ?a genial deviltry.? For Robillos, the charm of the work of figuration in Del Rosario is tempered by ?comedic touches,? exhibiting a playful kind of satirical, edgy humor directed at various targets like ?vicious slanderers? in ?Obedience Training? or ecologically destructive Homo sapiens in the oil-acrylic ?Tomorrow? or in the oil-acrylic on wood ?Eye Lands.? The Naïve artist then is not so naïve after all, but is full of ironic consciousness.

Radical critique

These are, in my view, profoundly necessary characterizations of what Robillos aptly calls the ?naïf mystique? of Del Rosario?s art. They gesture toward the ideological and political predispositions germane to this movement all throughout its history, which the artist is quite obviously aware of: from its radical critique of academic painting to its antimodernism or lamentations of modernity, which aligned it with the older styles and positions of Romanticism, or even its parodic commentaries on and inversions of the conventions of genre painting (?Airconditioning,? ?Lovers? Lane? or the wickedly funny visual pun but ultimately unreadable conjunctions of ?Safety Swing,? for example, are pointedly grabbing instances of the latter).

Certain facts must, however, be summoned not so much to undermine as to complicate these characterizations of Del Rosario?s artmaking. Consider, for example, that Del Rosario does not share the typical social background or autodidactism of Naïve artists.

With a painter for a father and an optometrist for a mother, and his formal training at PWU, 28-year-old Del Rosario may be reasonably inferred to have had intimate and structured socializations into academic art as well as perspectivalism.

Artistic optometry

As a literary critic, I am trained not to reduce the artistic object to biographical matters. But it is tempting to make much of the flying eye(s) in the works ?Eye Lands? and ?Hundred Eye Lands? as a kind of artistic optometry, some critical comment, resonant with biographical reference to his mother?s profession, about the questions any and every visual artwork poses to us: ?What do you see?? ?Can you see??

For him to layer or saturate his art with a ?naïf mystique? then is quite telling and should signal to art lovers, as he points out to Robillos, to ?see meaning? in his artwork beyond its screen of ?deceptive simplicity.?

(In this, he mimics many Naïve artists who made a big point of eliciting patronage from art-establishment critics initially scornful of their brand of art but were soon forced to accede, albeit with ceremonial condescension, that Naïve art compensated for its untutored ways of artmaking by the vividness or brightness of color and the obsessive attention to graphic detail in it, not to count the childlike wonder, joie de vivre, and creative freedom it succeeded in visually rendering).

Robillos is right, and so is Zulueta: Del Rosario?s art effectively ironizes itself, our concept of art (a point I hope to develop in another, more extended, essay) and helps us to adopt the ironic consciousness that is proper, even if barely adequate, to the workings of the art naïf.

Oscar V. Campomanes teaches the semiotics of literature, visuality, culture and media at the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Santo Tomas.