It is difficult to ignore the tragic in nature – to do so would discredit our humanity, or at least our awareness of it. And when this exhibition of contemporary art on nature and humanity is displayed, its overarching theme quite naturally becomes very significant. At the Jose T. Joya Gallery of the University of the Philippines – Cebu, which ran from April 28 until May 10, 2023, five Cebuano artists chose to confront this theme. Their responses ranged from a celebration of nature to more subtle interpretations of the future outcomes should humanity refuse to pay heed to their impact on the environment.

Panumduman sa Umaabot (Memory of a Future) is certainly not the first time that artists have used as the launching pad for an exhibition on nature. There is a story to convey however that can only be told by the five artists who give us these visual representations. 

The phrase “sustainability” has pervaded our discourse, yet it seems that its message has not sunk in deep enough. There is an assumed indifference of socio-collective consciousness around nature and its ability to nurture us, to “mother” us, to use the terms of Jay Nathan Jore. So, his painting series “Field of Memories” as well as installation piece “Golden Harvest” and “How to Feed a Family” challenge all viewers to respond meaningfully and creatively to this discourse. The curatorial presentation of corn with the traditional milling instrument juxtaposed with the paintings offer a fresh perspective to the audience, broadening their effect to nothing short of transcendental. No space is really neutral, and a viewer must always study the dynamic between art and context. This work that most successfully traverses the theoretical minefield offers them mixed with the elements of aesthetic creation and social commentary into a whole. The strategy of abstraction and realism and the critical discourse circumscribing it are, necessarily, also preoccupied with issues of art’s corporeality that contribute to its conditions of production. Part of what makes this work remarkable is the artist’s desire to realize a certain synchronicity between the natural and the spiritual.  

The supposed paths of these representations and their different implications and significations, while essential to a reading of Jore’s practice, is only part of his work’s loaded and layered message. This lingering assemblage is also part of what “Field of Dreams” unconceals as an artistic reflection of creation itself, and of the many ways in which the creative practice is constantly cycling through time.

We can recognize a sense of this temporal movement as the prevalent motif of Palmy Pe-Tudtud’s art: “The Frailty of Life and Death” and her installation of live roses hanging down over a mound of earth. It is a visual trope that is threaded throughout her exhibit on the concept of nature. Pe-Tudtud’s slender roses occupy space through a sense of energy and beauty suggesting powerful rhythm and sensuality. They convey a sense of dynamism – not just through the specific choice of resources – since flowers also wither, but by their bearing of intent. “The Frailty of Life and Death” with its breathtaking backdrop of colors and a vase of roses contrapuntal to the installation provides worthy insight into this specific artistic motivation. The installation materials’ intrinsic finiteness, rather than seen as a deficiency because the real roses wilt, become features through which to show and explore an intelligent interest in undying change, the passing of time and forces of nature that are larger than we are.

Various metaphors for nature continue to emerge throughout the exhibition such as Josua Cabrera’s “Unos” series. In Philippine mythology, the meeting of Habagat (Southwest Wind) and Amihan (Northeast Wind) became the decisive moment for him to make Amihan the queen of Himpapawiran (sky). By winning against all his rivals, including the fiercest of them, Buhawi (typhoon), he ensured that she would be immortalized as his love. The imagination that produces such visual images is deeply connected to nature as it relates to the weather in experience, awareness, and association. They not only refer to the indigenous and literary inspiration of Cabrera’s own work but also to the wealth of possible ways of formally visualizing the growing intensity of the relationships in nature which may range from calm to tempestuous. 

The paintings could be said to offer Cabrera a “niche of thought” in which he experiments with myth, using them in different combinations as artistic productions. “Unos” employs graphic shorthand to draw on the discourse around the power of nature and its mystery. Cabrera leads us from the realm of myth through a visual play – an interpretation of the meaning of “storm”. In its positive sense the term can be traced back to the power of an attraction, like one caught in a mild storm. Then as it develops it is a disturbed state of the physical environment that may be marked with significant disruptions to normal conditions as the storm signal intensifies. Exploring the work further suggests yet more readings. In “Unos Signal No. 4” the darkness spreads with several “meetings”. This observation of an act of violence feels like an ode to surrender. In view of the huge amount of destruction, the net of references increases. The mood being conveyed in the dominant motif of the winds clashing is more atmospheric than content related. The same naturescape develops a structural life of its own in the different drawings, making a model backdrop for strange confrontations in composition.

The origin of Radel Paredes’s diptych “Kapikas” lies in his appropriation of Henri Matisse and Joan Miro to establish a new frame of reference for Adam and Eve in his “Paradise” series. These pieces may be thought of as parallel systems that create alternative colorful content that transcend their setting and are related particularly to different discursive factors triggered by the artist in making this diptych. In the exhibit, the diptych participates in the dialectical environment where various voices begin a dialogue between art of the past and their present imports. Viewers are compelled to reflect on aspects of influence that stay in the background (forms and shape as well as colors) and to visualize different ways representations of “soulmates” travel from the time of creation to the time they were hung on exhibit. 

Paredes is not interested in literal connections between the works and their influences with his interventions. Rather, he endeavors to develop a productivity of readings; new meanings where the different aspects related to the art become an important feature of the artistic project. His artistic discourse explores the semantic changes built into such means. He highlights their historicity and refers to the role played by language and “translation” in this bright composition of his work. As a result, Paredes aims to a form of artistic practice centered on the creation of intercultural conversations between disciplines and contexts, which is also evidenced in the mixed media collage “Danger”. It provides his work with accents, nuances and surprise contents as they slowly unfold in space and time. Instead of being an object rooted to a place, it becomes a movement, a chain of meanings and overlapping histories.
The attempt to represent nature involves the need to respond to it. To be here in the present, one has to act according to what is happening in one’s immediate reality. Julianne del Mar’s art – moves in an uncommon orbit. Her watercolor paintings challenge us to a self-awareness to explore other modes of experience that are “unplanned” from the point of view of the action. 

The “Freedom Park Series” which consists of four paintings of what used to be common sights at Freedom Park (flower vendors and goldfish sellers) make us wish to witness from a temporal horizon what is effectuated as an “event”. A painting, this being there with virtually nothing but itself, may be read as the melancholic interruption of a lost moment from the past into the present. There is that tangible sense that it permanently exists in a constant state of becoming – a kind of here / where do I go from here – existence that blends what is an articulate declaration to be made of a narrative and yet not so. It is an invitation to look somewhere else, to give ourselves over to the work. 

The same impetus is present in the “Olango Series” which have the ability to keep the waterscapes fascinating yet open to the wildest reach of the imagination. The world cannot be exemplified because it is in itself always and already a representation – the painting is reality itself. The manner in which del Mar has option to the comprehension of the dailiness of the world is dazzling, because of her mastery in shoring up a chosen catalogue of the everyday. For this reason, her art is tough to access through words. There is a gap between the image and the audience that cannot simply be bridged with description. The “Olango Series” especially, create a space that a viewer cannot appropriate since their positions are opposite – the “thereness” of the painting and the “hereness” of the spectator. The art breathes talent, the ability to render through what seems like “mundane” images, nature as a very convincing labyrinth of significance.

We speak often now of a world that is gradually out of control – there are disasters, some of these are a burgeoning information culture, sublime in the magnitude of its urgency, that feeds a fear of being overwhelmed and completely unable to maintain a hold on our lives. Panumduman sa Umaabot allows us to be nowhere yet everywhere simultaneously. The exhibit is a contemporary narrative map of masterful variants embracing nature and humanity representations that are familiar in their diversity. The lyrical multiplicity of the paintings, laced with clues and gestures towards things we believe we know, permit us to unrestrainedly fill them with meaning, to make sense of things. 

One of the challenges that emerge in the exhibit is how can paintings really articulate something that is happening? When you make a painting of a situation, how can it make sense of that situation? Is the painting a static representation of something?

I would like to believe it is the viewer’s creative intuition that makes meaning in oneself of the painting. The painting exists for the goal of stirring in the viewer the question with which one’s perception of it should be part of. And the question is, how it means, and to what end?