The Moss mystique

I’ll write about them at greater length another time, but let me just announce that tonight and tomorrow night, one of my favorite singing groups — the UP Singing Ambassadors, led by conductor Ed Manguiat — will be holding farewell concerts before they embark on their next European tour. The concerts (at Teatrino in Greenhills, San Juan on May 12, and at the Church of the Risen Lord in UP Diliman on May 13, both at 7:30 p.m.) will help defray expenses for this prizewinning group, the only Asian group to win the 2001 Grand Prize in the Guido d’Arezzo competition in Italy. Catch them while you can! (Tickets at P300 and P500, half-price for students with IDs.)

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I’m not an art critic, but I have this pedestrian conviction that the best art of whatever kind speaks to you across all times and spaces, and says something not just about the circumstances of its creation but also about who, where, and what you are, right now.

I’m always prepared to be surprised and entranced, even enchanted; I like to think that I’m as hard-boiled a writer as they come, with few illusions left about the harshness of life, and I don’t respond well to art that tries to pretend otherwise. On the other hand, if all the artist does is tell me what I already know, and make me feel even more miserable than before, then I don’t feel enriched or enlightened, either. If I start smiling despite my dourness, or look at a piece for more than a few minutes — whether it’s a bronze fish by Brancusi or a father-and-son pastel by Roel Obemio — then something’s happened, and I’m in touch with something far larger than myself.

That’s what happens every time I look at a painting by an artist I’ve known since he was in his teens, and whose work I’ve followed ever since. Jason Moss put up his first exhibition in 1993, when he was only 17; last Saturday, he opened his 18th show (which he tongue-in-cheek calls “Debut”) in 15 years, a testament not only to his prodigious energy but also to his unflagging vision. Exactly what that vision is is something that art-studies theses and dissertations will be written about, and it’s best appreciated up close — or rather, as a cluster of paintings on a wall, from about 15 feet away.

Jason’s work blends grotesquerie — his manifest suspicion that our world is beset by demons of one kind or other, some of them within the self — with humor and wit. His latest collection, Jason says, “pokes fun at the superficialities of the age,” but there’s no doubt that Jason himself is having fun, no matter how dark his view of life may be. I don’t usually bother much with the titles of art works, but it’s hard to resist taking a longer look at anything titled “The end of the word organic,” “The Dull and the Dutiful,” “Play this game by yourself,” “It will kill you to trust me,” and “What some gay folks end up with.” (In the last piece, two men hold up a blue-headed, pink-bodied baby between them — except that the baby looks like a happy hybrid between a dog and a dolphin.)

When Jessica Zafra first encountered Jason Moss’ work 12 years ago in his second one-man show, the first word that sprang to her mind was “Europe.” She would later describe it with more specificity as “Berlin of the 1930s, cross-pollinated with goth-rock: Kurt Weill meets X-Mal Deutschland, Lotte Lenya meets Siouxsie and the Banshees.”

I bought a pastel piece (high praise from a UP professor with a pauper’s salary) from that show that Jessica saw titled “Mother and Child with Faun,” and to this day it hangs in my office, an inexhaustibly enigmatic triad that makes me want to write a book around it. Most recently something of the reverse happened. When my new novel Soledad’s Sister was being readied for publication (it should be out by the time you read this, courtesy of Anvil Publishing’s Karina Bolasco, who had patiently waited for over seven years for the manuscript to be finished), there was no doubt in my mind whose artwork I wanted on the cover, to capture all the dualities in the text. I’ll leave you to guess—when you go and see the exhibit (at the Blueline Gallery on the fourth floor of Rustan’s Makati, entrance at Glorietta 4 near Starbucks, running from May 10 until June 7) — which work might best represent the dark comedy that I had in mind. “Dark comedy” might not be too bad a description for Jason Moss’ work itself.  He doesn’t let one element get way too far ahead of the other.

The Moss mystique also made itself felt to the late writer-painter Andres Cristobal Cruz, who invited then 20-year-old Jason to exhibit some of his own early Picasso-inspired works alongside Andy’s in a show at the Lyceum. “The young students immediately found themes in Moss’ paintings familiar,” Andy would recall in mock lament. “They identified more with him than with me and my landscapes and mass protest images.” (Pointedly, one of Jason’s pieces in that show was titled “No More Pablos.”) Painter Marcel Antonio was “struck by the nature of his themes, most of them transgressive in a genuine, non-contrived way that dares to push the borders of the limits of taste. He’s evidently an artist who helped redefine certain grand narratives in art, at least in the local scene, and puts into question what constitutes taboo for one person yet is liberating for another.”

Those are fine words to be said of anyone, but again the best test is in a personal encounter with the work of the man. (It’s a poor substitute, but you can also go online and check them out at www.weloveintimidation.com/jasonmoss.) It’s sometimes hard to reconcile the painter of “Manners and Etiquette” (showing a restaurant full of dead monkeys, with the only one left alive, in the foreground, suffering a nosebleed as he contemplates eating a crab on his plate) with the passionate illustrator of children’s books that he also is (he has also been, at one time or another, an editorial cartoonist, a bartender, and TV art director).

But it’s one and the same complex sensibility, this fusion of power and charm that sets off Jason Moss as one of the most original and compelling Filipino artists, in this casual gallery stroller’s eye, of our time.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.