The artist in contemporary times is blessed with lessons from the past, gleaned from the technical explorations over the centuries on how to copy a still life, a landscape or a portrait, for instance, with exquisite and endearing exactitude. Rules on perspective, color harmony, or proportion, etc., abound for the taking of the artist who may find good use for them.
In the case of Eric Zamuco, one of this year’s more deserving recipients of the Thirteen Artists Awards from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, he goes beyond the copying of a particular scene and transporting it into his art. He rather makes use of the same to re-create, if not essentialize, it. As a result, he comes up with a highly abstract interpretation of something that is organically concrete. Zamuco exemplifies the contemporary spirit artists who empower themselves with not simply mediating the world of appearances, but creating their own visual, albeit spiritual, reality.
In the exhibit at the Corredor of the UP College of Fine Arts in Diliman, Zamuco puts this framework into handsome application.
Ten fabricated objects that resemble oars are casually strewn all over the gallery space. Three are jutting out from the walls. Three are laid out on the floor. Two are suspended from the ceiling. One is protruding from the floor, while another is wall-bound.
Two of these objects are lighted, making them look more like matchsticks than oars.
Six of the works on exhibition are the creative outputs of a brief furlough at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States in May last year when Zamuco was a Freeman fellow. Upon coming home, Zamuco continued with the artistic concern and was able to execute four more pieces to add to the collection.
The installation simulates the actual environment he stumbled upon in Vermont. Like the Philippines, Vermont has many bodies of water. In one place he visited, he saw a number of oars resting on the shore, on a canoe, hanging on the wall, standing in a barrel. Seeing this has equipped Zamuco the freedom to install his works in any manner he deems fit.
The exhibit at the Corredor is the third time Zamuco is presenting the works in public. The debut happened in Vermont when he unveiled the collection as a requirement of the grant. The second was at the Ayala Museum in January this year as a homecoming exhibit of sorts.
In the three times that Zamuco has exhibited the installative works, he resolves spatial concerns distinct from one venue to another. At the Ayala, he had his oars converted into floor pieces arranged like a phalanx in a parade, following the linear patterns of the gallery floor carpeting. At the Corredor, the appeal is more relaxed as the space has allowed him to be more flexible in his installation approach.
The Corredor installation hews closer to the one he did in Vermont. As he himself puts it when asked why the oars have to be installed this and/or that way, "What they are is where they are supposed to be. At the Corredor, I knew I would be able to exhaust the possibilities of the oars, and be able to install them in various ways."
One oar, in fact, protrudes from the wall as if from a boat and tilts to the floor as if touching the water.
Zamuco’s works are sleek. They have the look of industrial sophistication. The appeal owes much to the discriminating way by which Zamuco orchestrates his materials. Zamuco uses light, aluminum, wax, stones, fleece, wires, rods, hay, plant fibers, hair, plastic, paper and found materials like airplane windows, life jacket, shoe, magnifying lenses, pillow case, needles, bed springs, X-ray films, photographs, to cite but a few.
The materials are diverse, yet in Zamuco’s hands, they yield to a certain schema that in effect succeeds in unifying and simplifying them. Take for instance the color scheme. Amidst the plethora of shapes and textures, Zamuco has ingeniously pruned the color range to pewter, rust, brown and orange.
Each of the oars has a wooden pole, 10 feet long, finely finished to reveal the grains of the material. Unpainted and unvarnished, the natural brown color of the wood is quietly emphasized. The highly rectilinear element, being present in all, likewise contributes to the coherence of the collection.
It is in the blade part of the oar, what Zamuco terms as the head, that the artist accommodates his frenzy for materials. The installation provides an arresting interplay and intercrossing of lines and forms, shadows and textures, owing to the amalgam of materials gathered for the work.
The stage is clearly set. The gallery, with the uncanny mix of these sights, is turned into a wharf of sorts, or a workshop for boats, that even without the presence of water, the feeling for sailing or rowing is evident.
In a country as archipelagic as the Philippines, boats are material to connect people together. One way to propel these boats is through the employ of oars. It is here that Zamuco invests his oars with metaphorical and narrative references.
From the installation one can glean that Zamuco is deeply spiritual – a man living and professing his faith in his works. At this point, it comes as an inspirational surprise that the highly industrial look of his works has corresponding spiritual allusions. The contradiction may imply the growing structuralization, if not commercialization, of religion today, but Zamuco intends his works away from such controversy. Rather, the oars for him signify the spiritual journey he has taken in life, such that each oar corresponds to a verse or two he has read from the Holy Scriptures. Each oar has a personal story to recount. Each oar has a direct function in his life, whether in the form of a rebuke, a command and words of comfort.
The oars, which are individually titled, are tools to remind Zamuco of his Biblical readings and meditations, to be harnessed "from circumstance to circumstance – to stop, to move or to turn back like a rudder."
One piece, entitled "Commit," shows how Zamuco crafts his art through his convictions in God. Attached to the wooden pole are plastic sheets, Polaroid pictures, Polaroid sleeves and plastic envelopes. But the narrative content of the work is not found on the pictures but in the camera Zamuco used for the work.
Zamuco started with the work while in the United States but finished it in Manila. The meditation behind the oar was on prayer.
"When you pray," Zamuco says by way of expounding on the work, "you ‘commit’ or hand-over or surrender something to the object of our faith. In New York, I prayed for a camera. I found it, and bought it from a store on 17th Street. When I got home, I realized that the store didn’t charge me for it. I returned to the store with my receipt, to pay for it. Then the store attendant told me to just go and keep it for free!"
Even the exhibit title, Consisting Upholding is inspired by Zamuco’s devotionals. The last readings he had in Vermont before he opened his show in the US were from Colossians 1:17, ASV, to wit: "And He is before all things and in Him all things consist," and from Hebrews 1:3, KJV, "…upholding all things by the word of His power…."
For Zamuco, the written word keeps his works together.