Easy riders and raging memories
All merch in front, all showroom in back, RONAC Art Center is Bigboy Cheng’s hip, pop art hangout situated in Greenhills. Constructed from interlocking concrete blocks meant to conjure the mattress company of his family, it sports a Secret Fresh retail space facing Ortigas Avenue, with nods to the carnival along its curbside walk space—plush collectibles in red-painted carts, a Foto Kurabu kiosk—leading to the Secret Fresh Gallery at back, resembling, today, a Harley-Davidson salesroom with Olan Ventura’s airbrushed homage to Terminator 2 greeting you at the entrance.
Come inside. This is Ruel Caasi’s “Untitled,” an eclectic collection from his Cloud Grey Gallery artists over the past decade or so, in collab with Working Animals Art Projects. Showing until Sept. 5, it features works by EJ Cabangon, Jonet Carpio, Toti Cerda, Igan D’Bayan, Benjo Elayda, Arturo Sanchez Jr. and Ventura. “From a studio in flux to a Munch & Mario combo,” as Caasi’s opening note puts it, the show “mirrors the growing global trend of galleries stepping back to recalibrate” (as I learn, Caasi is recalibrating for an upcoming Manuel Ocampo/Ronald Ventura mashup, as well as an ambitious showcase of contemporary art next year).
In the meantime, step inside the showroom to meet EJ, whose silvery-glopped objects from childhood memory—Nickelodeon’s Nigel Thornberry, a Yellow Submarine—speak of the persistence of our passions. That gray fluid? “That is… time.” So, time is a gray, milky substance that envelops our memories? “Yes, but underneath it still, our childhood memories,” which remain intact. “It’s the same with, like, professions. Like me exploring art, being an explorer, being curious—just as Nigel is an explorer as well. He loves nature. It’s an influence.” His oil technique captures the vividness of our childhood dreams, even coated in a viscous goo of time.
Ventura’s passion for mechanical wizardry decorates the Harley-Davidson Fat Boy on display with T2 images, and he’s not shy about striding the thing, while across from it is a sleek metal helmet (sans visor) that would do Daft Punk proud, along with a monochromatic canvas showcasing various tools of the art of motorcycle maintenance.
Igan D’Bayan is there, and his large oil “Torment Nexus: Alpha Tracker” marks a main wall with splashes of pink and baby blue overlaying a Boschian hellscape: an act of rebellion, it turns out. “Those are colors I was warned not to use,” he explains, adding that his vision here—occasionally dipping into past characters—is about “the death of narrative,” which we are all currently enduring on a drip-drip-drip daily basis. Igan just chooses to freeze that process in time, in shocking pink and baby blue.
Benjo Elayda’s “Spiellage” is that aforementioned Munch-meets-Mario pop concoction, dressed in a distressed Robert Longo suit and dripping all over our dotcoms.
Toti Cerda’s “Morning with Bacon and Coffee” slyly inserts the artist (red clown nose on display) amid a Francis Bacon studio mélange, strewn with source photos, buckets of paintbrushes, and a subject, hands trapped between knees, face decorated with color slashes.
I meet Jonet Carpio, whose “Peregrina” serigraph slyly works Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” into its bird-of-prey pose. A nature artist, his silk-screening technique offers up pockets and striations of red paint in its grooves (one can’t help thinking also of a money-minting process), making it a visual marvel.
Later, I talk with Arturo Sanchez Jr., who explains his “Vessel,” a large, layered work lacquered over with Renaissance cutouts from books and magazines, “but in a modern context, naka contemporary.” The figure wears a halo, its interior on display in rivers of red; the wordplay of the title conjuring up religious icons as well as the idea of blood vessels. “It can be a vessel of memory, experience.” Memory is a common subject here.
Caasi talks about his background in advertising, and his early passion to be a director—one that translated into deftly curated shows like this. “It just happened that when I worked at an advertising agency, I did exhibitions, designs for trade fairs, things like that… Later on, these artist friends would always ask me to design and curate shows.” For “Untitled,” he returned to his roster of Cloud Grey artists, to offer a fresh showcase, without any directing notes. “I wanted the opportunity to show these artists—they’re serious artists but don’t get to be seen as much. Some went into advertising, come back to painting; some went into writing, became editors.” The problem now, as Caasi sees it, is that “most of the collectors in the Manila scene, when they come to galleries, they don’t study the artists; they just have lists of names.” RONAC, with its hip environment combining the commercial (merch) with the contempo (fine art), is a fitting showcase for these sometimes hidden, no-less-resonant voices.
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“Untitled” is at Secret Fresh Art Gallery, RONAC Art Center, Ortigas Avenue, Greenhills until Sept. 5.
