AS part of the Nokia and Inquirer Lifestyle Series, the “10 Most Exciting Young Artists” will open on Oct. 28 at The Gallery of Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Makati.

The 10 artists are Buen Calubayan, Kiri Dalena, Kawayan de Guia, Farley del Rosario, Dina Gadia, Raymond Legaspi, Lindslee, Winner Jumalon, Mark Salvatus and Clairelynn Uy.

The artists were chosen by internationally renowned sculptor Ramon Orlina, award-winning artist Guillermo “Ige” Ramos, the art director of Cocoon magazine, and Inquirer Lifestyle editor Thelma San Juan.

Artist-filmmaker Jay Pacena, who will curate the exhibit, said the artists showed the vibrancy of the Philippine art scene.

“Artists today explore different mediums, they don’t use traditional forms,” he said. “They break, reconstruct or go beyond the form. They explore different techniques and have new output.”

Calubayan, Dalena, Del Rosario, Gadia and Salvatus are featured in this issue.

KIRI DALENA
The artist as activist

Kiri Dalena looks at me and acknowledges familiarity —here is no high and mighty, isolated and removed artist. After establishing the lines that bound us, she jokingly whispers a rhetorical question, “I am not young or exciting… why am I here?”

For Kiri, her art is everything and a representation of her own personal involvement in the lives that are lived in this country and the contingent deaths we face every day. It is about her activism—the kind that translates into a dynamism in her work that refuses to be ahistorical, and banks precisely on a conscientious and consistent interest in the nation she lives in.

In this sense, Kiri seems to be necessarily in collaboration with her world all of the time, across the kinds of media she delves in—sculpture, documentary filmmaking, installation art—all these years we have known her to be an artist.

Kiri speaks of the dynamism of her recent work currently at the National Museum. She had asked carvers from her native Paete, Laguna, to render her clay sculptures in wood, replete with all its flaws and mistakes.

Here, Kiri speaks of how the weight of her work lies as well in its imperfections and seeming disregard for what would otherwise be deemed orderly, or correct, or, well, just plain perfect.

She also speaks of this collaboration as something that’s new to her, and, therefore as something that’s appealing.

Which just might be what keeps Kiri all excited—and exciting—as an artist. When the deep well of creativity comes from one’s own sense of the real conditions of nation, when it is entrenched in the societal changes and unjust stabilities that oppress and repress us, when it is conscious of one’s role in the bigger stage that we all necessarily perform in, there can really only be excitement.

MARK SALVATUS
The ‘probinsyano’ rebuilds the city

It is difficult not to get caught up in Mark Salvatus’ world. He speaks with a language that is learned, and speaks of his art with a chutzpah that only the young—and brazen—would.
Describing himself as an artist across disciplines, Mark speaks most passionately about the streets he inhabits, and feeds his art with the urbanity he breathes and lives.

This kind of artistic point of view came to Mark through a process that was very personal. A native of Lucban, Quezon, he sees his probinsyano roots as crucial to his consistent interest in urbanity and how people’s lives in the city revolve precisely around the images that permeate these spaces.

Billboards and advertisements, faces of politicians and MMDA art inspired a response from Mark. This prompted as well the beginnings of a group of graffiti artists he is part of, called Pilipinas Street Plan.

Given the mess and noise of the city, though, one can’t help but wonder what can be different about Mark’s “artful” images on the street—or how we can even distinguish it from every other graffiti image or slogan.

A look at his work reveals plenty of difference. Here, street art is always a rendering of a perspective of the city as an amalgamation of elements. Nature and its disarray; a knife on someone’s back; people oblivious to the city’s anger; a baby screaming in misery— are interspersed with graphics familiar from the city’s commercialism.
Dots, lines, and shapes in primary colors are interwoven into the moments of the city Mark renders in his projects.

Because the latter is really what they are, given street art, and given Mark’s obvious concern for the process that goes into the kind of work he does. Street projects are necessarily fleeting, and yet they also do call for a mass audience to react, and, in that sense, get involved.

The urban pedestrian, after all, has become immune to images of half-naked actors on billboards and fastfood signs, MMDA non-art, and the threat of being killed if they cross a street.

Stopping in front of any of Mark’s street projects would require not just time, but energy as well. And yet, maybe it is as valuable being ignored by the city’s inhabitants, as it becomes an indication not just of what is wrong with our urban spaces, but of what it is that’s wrong with us as the people of this city.

Mark Salvatus’ show, “Courtyard,” which is part of his Salvage Project, is running at Pablo Gallery (C-11 South of Market, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig). Visit http://pablogalleries.com.

FARLEY DEL ROSARIO
The quiet and the loud

Zambales-born and -raised Farley del Rosario could barely muster a smile. He seemed then to fit perfectly into the stereotype of the young artist: brooding, quiet, a little too nervous for comfort. A couple of minutes of cajoling, though, and a lot of laughter spelled the difference.

His works have been widely exhibited here and elsewhere in Asia.

Farley’s human figures transgress our perception of what is real. The bigger works deal with a familiar moment or derivative image.

His signature image—an oval face, round eyes and mouth, and a nose that extends straight from the forehead to almost the tip of the upper lip—would be scary were it not deftly in the hand of someone like Farley, who intersperses it with the colors and shapes of our childhood.

To an audience of his generation, there is more here than mere nostalgia. These works, after all, are a complex combination of youth and evolution, of familiar images and a very modern take on them.

While Farley’s works look happy and bright, and while his point of view is humorous and a conscious play with words and images, there is so much here than just a childlike view of the world, or a memory of one’s youth.

It almost seems like it is here Farley is removed from his childhood, uprooting himself from the limits of the provincial, and just taking flight.

DINA GADIA
The young and giddy

She was obviously overwhelmed silly by the fact that she was chosen as one of the 10 most exciting young artists.
Dina Gadia is the youngest at 23, and just might have more going for her other than her age. She has a clear sense of what it is that interests her, where her art must lie, and what it is she can do without—or must necessarily rebel against.

To Dina, there must be enjoyment in creation, and the need to come up with something new. This, even when her preferred medium has been collage, and even when what that requires is a combination of various art forms.

What fuels Dina’s artistic production is popular culture—toys, movies, icons, posters—and what it becomes is not so much a tribute to her childhood as what remains as a central truth: a reconfiguration of the images of our every day.

Old romantic Hollywood faces are violently reinvented (the smoke from an explosion that comes from nowhere; the waves that envelope most of a frame). The floral and pink are made strange by the anger it is interwoven with. The vintage image of little girls skipping and at play is reconfigured into faceless forms with one filled with flowers, the other with geometric shapes.

Yet there is enjoyment for every viewer of her work who can go beyond its seeming dismemberment of what is familiar. It is the pervasiveness of popular culture that has informed the ruins of our everyday lives. In Dina’s art, we are forced to contend with its disfigurement and its falsities.

Dina Gadia’s “Ultra Plastic Style” is running at Galerie Hans Brumann (L/3, Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Makati) until Oct. 30. Call 7282175 or e-mail
dididee@hiraya.com. Visit ghb.
hiraya.com.

BUEN CALUBAYAN
Artist as rebel

Being one of the cultural Center of the Philippines’ 13 Young Artists for 2009 seems to have done little to change Buen Calubayan’s attitude about the world.

If there’s anything distinctly different about Buen, it is the fact that he has no artist complex. Not even when we talked about a rebellious streak, as shown by his run-in with the Catholic university, where he graduated and taught. He said the authorities complained about his “open display of distorted ideas and atheistic beliefs.”

In the ideal academic world, his works would be appreciated as brave depictions of how some sectors would imagine religion and religiosity in contemporary times. Buen believes religion suspends our critical abilities.

And yet all it takes is a conversation with this 28-year-old to realize that much of it comes from a consciousness of the things that dictate our lives in this country. He speaks of government as well, and how both structures must inevitably be questioned for his art to take form. And his art takes various forms—installations, paintings, mixed media—all of which require the participation of his audience.

It is difficult, after all, to watch a trail of live rats vis-a-vis a huge depiction of a sneering Pope Ratzinger.

Faced with images of Jesus Christ as human being—getting drunk and vomiting, in a gas mask in the context of war—it is difficult as an audience not to react, religious or atheist.

In this sense, and in this way, Buen’s work remains most powerful.