Painter in exile

Sometime during the turn of the last millennium the newspaper illustrator Benjie Lontoc left the Philippines for Norway, land of the midnight sun, for cooler pastures as well to join his better half who’d been working as a nursing assistant there since the 1980s. It’s not every day you get to encounter a Filipino artist in Norway, and true enough he has been on vacation in his Taguig studio rarely in the past nearly seven years, or else making himself scarce, trying to come to terms with varied existential dregs.

Before he left he was staff artist for Today newspaper alternating on the editorial cartoon with Ludwig Ilio now with Singapore’s Straits Times, putting-into surreal visuals Teddyboy Locsin’s hyper real and at times scathing commentaries and editorials on the state of the nation before the publisher-editor became Makati congressman.

Lontoc also had a one-man show at the now shuttered Blind Tiger along Visayas Avenue, which was generally well received, continuing the trademark he had started with the informal group of artist illustrators obscurely known as the Obscenarists, that included Ilio, Dante Perez and Roxlee among others, whose foray into the public consciousness came in the “Chromatext” exhibits at Pinaglabanan Galleries in the 1980s.

In the Pinaglabanan shows, there was one large oil painting that stood out, a portrait of a lady of the night, or courtesan if you will, who was regularly “tabled” by the Obscenarists during their wild drinking binges at Apartment 9 on Shaw Boulevard, which however has since burned down and as per Lontoc, has been transformed into a car repair and motor shop.

Then in rainy July this year the painter voluntarily in Norwegian exile came back to good old ’Pinas to renew acquaintances and catch up with friends, beering a few hours in a watering hole off Shaw.

It’s with Rox, he says of the Apartment 9 woman painting, that classic of subdued grotesquerie. It might have gotten misplaced in the midst of his friend’s bohemian wanderings.

He’s sort of lost affinity with his work that appeared in Midweek magazine, for which he did illustrations for the editorial, fiction and poetry, and a sports column titled “Left Hook.”

What’s past is past, he says, and balks at a suggestion that the Midweek drawings — with the occasional woodcut effect — be used as possible visuals for this trope.

Over a couple of buckets of beer light and native pulutan, Lontoc says that Rox’s child bride Lot is helping him put up his website, where any needed visuals of the latest work can be accessed shortly.

He has with him a handy digital camera, and through a portable screen can be viewed a series of his recent works, mostly pastel on paper, black and white but still a far cry from the prints and woodcuts of yesteryears.

The sun is out only three months of the year, he says, so the Norwegians really like it when it’s summer because it’s such a rare occasion when the weather is not musty and gray.

He has been working in a restaurant in a hotel in Oslo, part of the kitchen staff slicing onions and operating the dishwasher among other tasks, alternating between the morning and swing shifts. He and his wife’s apartment is a short train ride away in the outskirts of the capital, and there’s a spare guest room in case someone comes visiting from the home country.

Because the reproductions on the digital cam are rather small, we can only get a hint of what Lontoc has been up to lately, tucked away in his studio after hours in the hotel kitchen. But there are inevitable traces of the vintage painter — the absurd humor, doffing his hat to the surreal gurus.

What might be apparent is that the works thrive in a vacuum, of being sui generis, because the painter himself noted that in Norway there’s so much space, the population so sparse that art cannot help but mark its own canvas, maybe even create itself.

The works on paper, perhaps Oslo paper, display a regenerative isolation, the quiet joy of the artist at having found time to spend with his material, with his craft. We were a bit hard-put to identify anything overtly Filipino in them, but this could be due to the possibility that details were lost in the miniature images.

The actual size, the painter informs us, is slightly bigger than the standard 8 x 11 inch bond, and can be tacked on the wall or framed.

But in such available smallness we could still espy the unmistakable dark humor, the offbeat, slightly off-kilter imagination of a Pinoy artist in Norway. We are reminded of the experiments in graphite by RM de Leon, only less abstract.

Next year there’s a show being planned, possibly in Mag:net, or in Art Informal on Connecticut Ortigas, whose proprietor Tina F. has expressed interest in Norwegian would.

Lontoc, though he’s dabbled in computer graphics at Today, still prefers working long-hand, with pencil or pen on paper for studies, then using pastels or watercolors.

He raves too about the cultural life in Norway, panalo p’re, the CDs and DVDs that go on sale at times making them affordable to his kroner, even as he says it’s not wise to keep converting to the times eight peso equivalent, because then “you wouldn’t buy anything.”

Before the end of July he’ll be back in Oslo, bidding goodbye for a while to his wife’s resort in Taguig, to secretly confound the Norwegians in his dual role of restaurant hand slash overseas Filipino artist.

Meanwhile the local art world will be waiting not exactly with bated breath for the forgotten Obscenarist’s sort of a homecoming show in 2009, maybe subtitled “Pinoy Noir Way,” works on paper by a Filipino artist in Norway.