By Ian Rosales Casocot
Often when I go and see exhibitions in town, I turn off the pesky part of my brain that allows voices uttering art theory, and art history, and art techniques, and just feel around the gallery, and be drawn to the one object that I cannot shake.
In the Arté Café Gallery exhibit, Prekaryats II, now on display at the Arts & Design Collective-Dumaguete (ADCD) at #58 EJ Blanco Drive, this happens to be Copycat, a work in acrylic by Cebu artist Idwardo.
There’s something vaguely cinematic about the work, like a piece of color film stripped to its basic Technicolor separations, which render the subject—a young man in an Asian squat staring straight at the viewer—both mysterious and compelling, rendered as he is in rainbow basics. That his “copies” in the other colors show different facets of himself—one faceless and the other grotesquely masked—also lend to this mystery, signifying some subtext of horror.
There’s an interactive quality to the art as well: when you take the invitation to scan the QR code beside it, your cellphone screen immediately becomes a camera that has settings making each figure pop out more prominently.
It’s quite a nice addendum to the exercise, but I like the tripartite nature of the painting itself: our selves in three iterations, guises of who we are, staring straight at life [or the viewer] with a somber, even steely gaze.
And my thought wander: I wonder what he thinks of me, this young man in a squat in three colors. I wonder why he stares so.
Prekaryats II marks a kind of rebirth for Arté Café Gallery, which used to occupy space at the second floor of the Arnaiz Heritage House along Rizal Avenue. Their transfer to the Bejar Heritage House compound, which also houses the various creative enterprises comprising ADCD, feels like a great and decisive move, with Arte Café gallerist Skye Benito now perfectly at home with fellows artists and creative entrepreneurs.
The ADCD has been, in many ways, a good response by local artists to the demands, often painful, of contemporary realities.
In Prekaryats II, Ms. Benito has curated an exhibit that is also an artistic response to the same realities. The exhibition statement bares this: “[The exhibit] draws from the current realities of young creatives navigating the harsh terrain of the art industry. No longer standing at the edge, they have stepped out into the world. Now they are living the precarious existence they once anticipated. They confront the truth that life as an artist is a relentless struggle. And with today’s cut-throat society and saturated art market, their anxieties only grow sharper. Will they endure as artists? Will their art ever be enough to survive?”
Which sounds more like a plea than an aesthetic statement connecting together the various works on display—but why not? Why can’t a plea be a kind of aesthetics?
The statement also says: “Every piece in this exhibition portrays what it means to be a young artist in the here and now. The works speak not ony of hopes and dreams, but also of the stark realities of being undervalued and unsure of what tomorrow holds.” Which might explain the stark stare of the young man in Idwardo’s painting.
Or the topsy-turvy assemblage resembling a home in James Dinglasa’s To Yearn for a Memory Palace.
Or the void resembling the darkness of a girl’s psyche in Peony on Fire’s Papersistence.
All the rest of the pieces do resemble that ennui, that struggle—some more jagged than the others, and everything a shout.
Other artists featured in the exhibition include Amor Beah Singh, Ceona Gonzales, Christopher Neive Hisanan, Densen Almeda, DRIZZ, Enyalenn, Gabrielle Mayol, James Dinglasa, Jani, Kiki, Kompoztika, Marco Blackbolt, Sepuwaku, Snafu, Stacey Momongan, Tansy, and Yeuzakela—all of whom are students and graduates of the Fine Arts program of the University of the Philippines-Cebu.
The exhibit runs until Jan. 30, 2025.
