Nostalgia Is Not What It Used To Be
Ronald Achacoco
RM de Leon
Jonathan Olazo
Trek Valdisno
3-13 December 2007

‘Nostalgia is not what it used to be’ is one for the ironies. We delve into the past to reconnect with our forlorn selves, hoping to find our way in the midst of the tyranny of dire times. Or maybe, this happily jaded oxymoron is just to peg a forgotten condition from a midcareer stance for a lonely dog of a painter. Nostalgia is the wistful coming back to a place, and a semantic variant is melancholia, a thematic discourse for man in suffering because of his distance to his God. From an artistic standpoint, a recent and most talked about theme is the anachronistic coming of Modern art, relative to faraway ‘art utopias’ that have witnessed its demise:  ‘we are nostalgic for a modernist future that never happened’*.

R.M. de Leon once did an exhibition ‘Cute Can Be Ugly’, wherein he painted monochromatic and very adeptly executed works on paper based on digitally manipulated photographs taken inside a taxi cab while going to and fro routine destinations in the city of Manila. Each photograph is taken from the vantage point of the passenger backseat, and framed in such a way that they incidentally include the personal potpourri of the cab driver poised along the cab’s dashboard and the outside scene through the windshield. The main objective of this exhibition is to display and explore the sense of kitsch in the quotidian, but a strong undercurrent is the wave of nostalgic impulses willing empathy in the artist’s procedure in arriving at a visual picture. The driver and his personal effects finding their way around the city ramify a certain romance. Mementos travelling in accidental messengers, (the taxi cab), and policed by mismatched and misdirected scenes witnessed by an accidental voyeur (the artist) heightens the sublime curiosity via allegory.  For the exhibition, the artist will feature works on paper using acrylic mediums, based on interesting generic drawings found in educational books during late 50’s. The images feature graphic outlines of people with their faces turned away from the reader of these books, and seemingly looking into the horizon line within the pages of these illustrations. The choice images are amusing for the artist because they humour conventional notions of picture-making, specifically the fear of having a painted figure having no face, in this case, oddly hidden.

Ronald Achacoso works with images as if they were libraries of iconographies at his side and disposal, and curates a resonant juxtaposition that coaxes the cerebral power of images in a narrative. To mythologize gives form to an idea, and symbols propagate myths. To extrapolate a bit from the accepted norm that photographs of scenes from the material world are portable tombs and pronouncements of death, it is archetypal that absence gives way to the memory of the essential, and spirit is more powerful than the material. A series of icons are projected for the exhibition: a photograph of a big snake found around the city of Manila, an astronaut/fallen angel, and a configuration of stained glass windows from a cathedral. Obviously nomadic threads to a puzzle, there is deliberate measure for each image to remain as that, obscure and unassuming, however, the oeuvre of images is paranoid with paradisiacal nostalgia. These ‘chosen’ and un-arbitrary images may be private utopias the artist may indulge but also a circumstance to up the ante and resolve a questionable mediocrity, vying for the perfect wit between the seen image and the expression of an idea. And, at day’s end, they are also endearingly sentimental iconographies calling to our very archetypal natures, traces left behind to coax the artist and us.

Trek Valdizno describes the paintings he will do for the exhibition as ‘layers upon layers upon layers of painting’. Following the aesthetic of paintings evoking the palimpsest, the paintings will rest atop other layers of supposedly finished paintings, about an inch-thick of grotesque oil-based paint. The methodology samples abstract-expressionistic painting attitudes, but twists in an odd but beautiful way as the obliteration of an under painting allegorizes a polar nostalgia, a nostalgia that has no beginning and yet is a no place and an autonomy which starts from a blank canvas.  An exaggerated allegory made for the activity of art making in the locale also known as the Pearl of the Orient, the effervescence of nostalgia or lack of it effect the mutation of the anomalous. The Modernist insignia is no longer what it is, but perhaps found its way in the household. Because there is nothing to be nostalgic about, the misfortune of no roots, (or is it a fortunate license?), allows for anarchy of no precedent. Abstract painting which equals less artiness has taken on artiness. The luxurious drips and sensual dances of the abstract stroke have seized our pleasure and made us dream of the scenes of the idyllic. Pop Art is about art away from the sublime and unknown, but it doesn’t make it less truthful.  In fact, it could be the answer to the slips and religiosity of the subconscious, via its proliferation of signs making up of the consumerist world. If abstract painting has assumed household-name status, does an abstract painting become a commodity and elevates/degrades into Pop Art?

Jonathan Olazo has taken to doing paintings based on imagery that he thinks have found him and gives form, (however mystified due to a self-imposed aesthetic requirement), to some of his personal qualms about many matters. He judges himself also by being bitten by the nostalgia bug in current pursuits, confessing that these are off-shoots of shelved projects and assignments during his matriculation in the Dirty Room, a class he had during his time at school. Edgy abstract paintings are based on white on white bond paper studies that had been pinned on the hallways for a mini-show, and found objects and clipped newspaper photographs served one way or another to exercise ala prima painting.  

(Mag:net Gallery is at  Agcor Building, 335 Katipunan Ave, Loyola Heights, Quezon City. For Inquiry please call 9293191 (Che) or email magnetgalleries@gmail.com or visit www.magnet.com.ph)