ON view at Warehouse Gallery of Finale Art File (Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Pasong Tamo, Makati City), for three weeks, is ?Figuring the Times,? which features 22 paintings from the Paulino Que Collection.

Finale managed to cajole Que, among the country?s most respected private collectors, to show what he believed to be the best among paintings he commissioned from young artists or purchased through various galleries over the past decade. Curatorial advice was provided by Evita Sarenas and art historian Patrick Flores. It is the first in a series of educational, non-selling exhibits showcasing private collectors? choices.

The works range from Mark Justiniani?s huge triptych (70? x 174?) to Ronald Ventura?s relatively small work (48? x 40?).

Of the 22 artists, Jojo Legaspi is the oldest (born 1959) and Liv Vinluan the youngest (born 1987).

The other painters are Elmer Borlongan, Charlie Co, Louie Cordero, Marina Cruz, Kiko Escora, Alfredo Esquillo Jr., Nona Garcia, Emmanuel Garibay, Kawayan de Guia, Geraldine Javier, Mark Justiniani, Annie Kabigting, Robert Langenegger, Maya Muñoz, Manuel Ocampo, José Santos III, Yasmin Sison, Rodel Tapaya, Wire Tuazon, and Ronald Ventura.

The Que collection is comprehensive (see ?A Visual Narrative of the Philippine Imagination,? Arts of Asia: Vol. 34, No. 3, May-June 2004) but does not include significant works by hardcore Social Realists of the late 1960s-late 1980s, who were heavily influenced by Russian, Mexican and Chinese propaganda art.

Que has only a few works from that era?s Conceptual artists, who believed that art was created by the viewer viewing an object, not by the intrinsic qualities of the work itself.

In the 1990s, Conceptual Art was at its peak internationally, when the Young British Artists (YBAs), led by Damien Hirst, gained the patronage of the great collector and art dealer Charles Saatchi, and the London art establishment. Conceptualism?s ideas such as anti-commodification, social and/or political critique, and ideas/information as medium continue to be enduring aspects of installation, performance, and electronic or digital art.

Eventually there was a backlash against Conceptual Art. By the early 2000s, artists began returning to figurative painting and Classical Realism, reviving 19th-century Neoclassic and Realist methods of artistic training and techniques.

Triumphant return

As art historian Flores? title suggests, the 22 artworks in ?Figuring the Times? signal the triumphal return of figurative art and help us understand our era.

These young Filipino painters defy categorization as either Social Realist or Conceptual artists, adopting features of both as they see fit. The dialectics between Social Realism versus Conceptual Art, between Classicism versus Modernism versus Postmodernism, between high art versus popular art, provide the momentum and energy in New Philippine Painting.

Initially purchased by not-yet-in-the-money young collectors, older ones like Paulino just began catching up in the late 1990s. His first acquisition was ?Mendiola? by Garibay. The subject is Social Realist, but its sophisticated, gritty texture is not found in the facile propagandism of previous activist painters.

By the 1990s, our globalizing consciousness necessitated new aesthetics. The Figurative Expressionism and Surrealism in Co?s ?The Dreamer Dreaming for Peace? attempts to transcend the limitations of the Philippine tradition.

The mainstreaming of New Painting had progressed to such an extent that by the latter 2000s works by young Filipino artists were fetching ever-soaring prices in auctions in Hong Kong, Singapore and Jakarta. Speculators rushed to buy everything on sight, with no real understanding.

Goth imagery

To understand New Painting is to come to terms with the goth, which underlies Western-influenced world culture today.

The Goths were an Eastern Germanic tribe that dominated European culture from the 11th to 14th century. The ?Gothic? style became a pejorative term during the Baroque period.

But from the late 18th century, people became fascinated with medieval ruins, romances and brooding heroes, Roman Catholicism and the supernatural.

Gothic Revival literature was associated with a mood of horror, morbidity, darkness, the occult. It inspired features of later horror literature and cinema, such as ruined castles or churches, ghosts, melodramatic plots. The most famous gothic villain is the Eastern European vampire, which later morphed into Dracula.

Postmodern goth peaked in the early ?80s as part of the punk, which grew out of non-mainstream pop music into a new subculture.

The philosophy underlying the goth is despair: Life is dark, life is sad, all is not well, people will try to hurt you. To be goth is to be into death (thus the skulls and death imagery in popular art).

As early as 1977, Karl Lagerfeld hosted the Soirée Moratoire Noire party, specifying ?tragique exigée absolument noire? (?totally black tragic dress required?). Elements of flamboyant Baroque court dress, the Victorian cult of mourning, deathrock, punk and androgynous styles were brought to couture runways.

The goth look combined ?corpse paint? (pasty makeup with dark eyeliner) with dyed black hair, black fingernails, tattoos and piercings.

Goth imagery exploits the darker side of sexuality found in BDSM culture (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism). It involves sexual role-playing, fetishism, sadomasochism and power exchange.

Nevertheless, goths generally do not support violence, hatred and aggression. The subculture emphasizes individualism and creativity, tolerance for diversity, cynicism, and a dislike of social conservatism.

Whether consciously goth or not, the New Painters, whose canvases tend to be large, seek to transcend the everyday, through the sublime or the satirically camp.

The beauty and craftsmanship of some artists? works gratify and ennoble those who see them. But some New Painters emphasize what for most of society is sensational and shocking, lurid and tasteless theatricality.

Ambivalent

Gothically ambivalent is Tapaya?s ?The Legend of Sibul Springs.? Are the diwata?s scrawny arms flailing in anger, or distress? Is the romantically attired gentleman in mortal fear of Nature, or is he about to unleash man?s evil over hapless Nature?

The influence of the goth is apparent in the brooding, romanticized male persona in Muñoz?s ?This Is Lester.? The bubbles soaring over the green grass in Javier?s ?Bubbles in His Head? brings us back to the innocent pleasures of childhood, until our eyes juxtapose that image with that of the dying man below.

The Photorealistic ordinariness of the living room in Garcia?s ?Nothing Ever Happens Here? is belied by the ghostly figure in the billowing curtain.

For the New Painters, sexuality is confrontational. Vinluan?s ?Joseph and Marguerite? shows a woman?s hands not caressing her lover?s nape but poised to strangle him.

In Escora?s ?The Strangers,? the blatant nakedness of the female contrasts with the guardedness of the male; both wear masks, symbolizing the lies brought to the table in sexual relationships.

Legaspi?s ?St. Thelma? unflinchingly and unforgivingly dissects the sexual grotesquerie that is humanity.

In ?Little Mouse? II, Sison flees into the innocence of a childhood as structured as a fairy-tale house.

Just as unsettling is Ventura?s ?Pink Blanche,? an indictment of how society makes little girls mechanical and mindless victims to gender-role norms.

The complex mood of Cruz?s ?Memories of the Twins? Piano Recital? is heightened by the diverse patterns and motifs, the play on visual harmony and disharmonies.

Just as apparently unstructured is Santos? ?Behind the Scenes,? which refers to recent journeys and symbolic composites of characters and situations. Transcending the multiplicity of perspective in the graphic works of Bencab and Gelveson-Tequi, Cruz and Santos? visual-blog approach redefines the parameters of time and memory.

Allegorical impulse

The reemergence of an allegorical impulse in Postmodern art can be seen in Ocampo?s ?Holy Trinity,? which appropriates Gothic and Baroque iconography.

Highly developed is the lowbrow sense of humor, often reveling in the ugly: convoluted intestines, gore, offal, decay, disorder. Cordero?s ?Untitled? portrait depicts a loathsome creature wearing a T-shirt with ?Destroy All Monsters? emblazoned on his chest.

In Langenegger?s ?Rolling Paperworks,? nine-to-fivers prioritize paperwork by rolling the dice.

Postmodernist appropriation is the transformative use of borrowed elements in the creation of new work. It may involve the assemblage of disparate found objects and readymades, as in De Guia?s Dadaist work, ?Subtle Repercussions A.?

In ?Conversation with Bacon,? Kabigting?s subject is not the British artist?s painting on a dissection, but the conjunction between the artist, art and the perceiver, signified by the enmeshed fingers of the viewer peering into the work.

In Tuazon?s ?The Great Learning on the History of Consciousness,? the viewer has to relate the image to the text, as well as the title, leading to an ?Aha!? moment. Is the object of aesthetic production the artwork, or that moment of comprehension?

Social commentary is constantly lurking in the work of the New Painters. There is Borlongan?s engagingly quirky, tongue-in-cheek take on Manila?s art scene, ?One-Man Show.?

Esquillo in ?The Thomasites Were Here? delivers an incisive indictment of the mis-education of Filipinos during the US colonial regime. The central panel in the superbly rendered photo-based triptych is that of a group of provincial schoolchildren wearing stars over their eyes and Groucho Marx noses. The left shows a schoolroom in the early 20th century; the right is the reverse of the same image, but with empty spaces where their heads should be.

Panoramic narrative

The last work to be included in this show ? barely making it to the deadline ? is Justiniani?s ?Round Trip Overload,? a work so large he had to cut through the roof just to get it out of his house. Providing glimpses of key historical conjunctures in the rearview mirrors, his panoramic narrative addresses the Pinoy Everyman through the allegorical vehicles of Religion, the Military, and Entertainment.

Clerics offer moral prescriptions, but dogma is trampled as they succumb to worldly pleasures. The revolution of 1896 failed in spite of the martyrdom of heroes.

The phallus-faced military has only the empty sea on its sights, despite the corpses decorating the uniform. One boot is that of a fast-food clown; the Filipino soldier is naught but a castrated dog.

Entertainment and the mass media offer only the promise of karaoke pleasures to mail-order brides; the prospect of Heaven through false prophets (note Nora Aunor in ?Himala?); and the ratty allure of Mickey Mouse. A familiar face, representing political power, is invested with humor and street-food ordinariness by a functionary manipulated from the shadows.

Justiniani?s is an extremely important visual document of the times, a declaration that New Painting is relevant, doing well, grown sophisticated, steely eyed and ever eloquent.

These artists will be among those who will determine the direction of painting in this country the rest of this century. Without a doubt, at least one shall emerge a National Artist in time.