AGANG Maganda?s surrealist colors are washing over mist-borne Baguio.

In ?Phantasmagoria,? on view at The Manor in Camp John Hay, Loakan Road, Baguio City, Agang treats viewers to a feast of provocative images in dreamlike hues that seem to transport their immediate surroundings ? Baguio in the midst of its Centennial as a chartered city and as the Summer Capital of the Philippines ? into a locus that is everywhere and nowhere. It?s a location whose address is both fantasy and trance.

Those who have followed the career of Agang, who took up Fine Arts at Philippine Women?s University, won?t be displaced by the show. His trademark surrealism still governs here.

?Sleeping Cello? evokes the romance of music with its beautiful rendering of the classical string instrument assuming the luscious curves of the female nude. Here is a clever melding of the neoclassic and the romantic achieved through surrealism, a modernist sensibility that fuses contraries and, through heightened realism, makes the fantastic something familiar.

If there?s a new development here, it?s in the matter of depth and consistency.

But the unreality may set in when the viewer considers the space in which Agang has chosen to unleash his pipe-dreaming: Baguio, still retaining its sheen, despite the wear and tear, despite the urban challenges, of Burnham?s City Beautiful, pitted against the artist?s iconography of reveries and alternative worlds, the City of Pines versus the Castle in the Sky.

One finds the collision and the communion in Agang?s ?Dreamscape? series: the shaft of light setting forth in clear relief what looks like scarlet foliage and Agang?s iconic falling or drifting leaves amid a subterranean backlot in ?I;? and a tower of a mountain bathed in golden light as, again, the leaves waft and fall, in ?II.?

In both works, landscape is recast as dreamscape, and it is difficult to resist making a connection between Agang?s topographical remodelings on canvas and the location in which he conducts his reshapings ? as if clueless Baguio were up for a makeover.

Perhaps it is just as well. The artist?s vision reforms and remakes the environment where his works obtain and thrive. Agang?s art does credit to Baguio, and Baguio, for all the observation that it has become less than its old pristine self, does credit to that art. Theirs is a communion in dream-making.

?Phantasmagoria? is sponsored by Camp John Hay Development Corp.; Caltex Chevron Brightest Star Service Station; Baguio Tourism; Sentro ng Tanghalan-School of Performing Arts; BGIMC, Goldilocks, The Junction, and The Artery Manila. It runs until October.
Call The Manor at (074)424-0931-47.