'Aqui sila tumba-tumba'
A couple of art shows earlier this year, though long since packed up or sold to collectors or given away to friends, apart from the usual trek back to the studio and bodega under safe wrap of plastic or other earth friendly material, caught the attention of a few art habitués’ habitually wandering minds.
Before the unrelenting summer, on a side street in a leafy enclave of Pasay a slingshot away from the MRT/LRT interchange and the not very discreet motel row leading to the Mall of Asia, right on Loring Street sits the Galeria Duemila that could be a setting for a postwar short story but instead had Mideo Cruz’s “Deities” on view for a few weeks in February.
A revisionist rendering of humankind’s need for idols and how they are shaped and structured by the imagination befitting specific needs, “Deities” has the formerly restless Cruz working on solid material both conceptual and in terms of found objects, patiently molding his different idols with one eye cast moistly toward infinity, and the other ruminating on the poem “Ozymandias” by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which was reproduced on one exhibit wall like a mantra or correlative text to the proceedings.
The long sands did stretch far and wide, except that the viewer found himself in a garden in Pasay with Mideo ex machina’s gods fallen at his feet, only to rise and fall again.
Of particular note was the subject painting “Nativity,” quite near the entrance, of a ship caught in the cross tides of time, beneath a friendly moon or maybe we are reading too much into the work that is the crafty equivalent of those ships trapped in bottles like messages, only better because represented in a kind of subdued 3-D but without the need for those special glasses to enjoy it.
Then there is “Nurturing Immortality,” with a faceless woman statue sitting calmly on her uneventful throne, and on her lap a cat, certainly of no mean consequence. How many lives does it take to be immortal? Nine is a good number, but the artist consciously veers from the standard cliché to form his own truths inabsolute, with a plethora of similarly situated idols nurturing other animals, say a dog with wagging tail, such that they could well be a collection of stone shepherds. There’s even one piece that features a pair of hollow-like blocks, with arms jutting out of either one’s side as if they were watching out for each other, straight out of the book of imaginary hollow blocks.
It won’t take long for the gallery-goer to realize the odds favor the slow maturation of the artist, as in the series of vernal equinox canvases, festering contraption and possible conversation piece for mumblers. By learning how our idols fall we set them up again, with armies of decapitated miniature doll heads in green littering the hard won way.
Another study in abject, delicate balance, held at roughly the same time as Cruz’s though on the other side of town, Renato Ong’s “Tumba Tumba” had San Juan holding their collective breath right around Art Informal along Connecticut Street. The exhibit featured mostly a number of tumba-tumbas, not really rocking chairs but diverse figurines doing a roundabout balancing act on round pegs, like gymnasts. Occasionally one ran into a higante-like figure, strategically placed like the four seasons.
Program notes mention Ong’s sense of play in his work’s rendering, something at once evident upon entering the gallery. The tumba-tumbas may be witnesses but they are hardly mute, for motion and the constant twirling are their speech, stopping them doesn’t necessarily mean silence but a break in the action, an intermission. If they seem concentrated at one side of the gallery, near the sliding glass door to the patio, it could be that they are peering at the kibitzers outside, themselves making like figurative tumba-tumbas with their stray conversation balancing on the canapés and beer, the pasta and wine. But which are the figurines, going round and round, and which are the people, going round and round?
If you notice, not two of the pieces are the same. Are they mostly female? Not really, the artist says, short of suggesting that their sex is incidental, because each work is complete in itself, an island of zen in the puddles of idle destiny.
But there’s no need for big words here. It’s like this: If one can balance the time between art shows and still surface in a piece and write about it, then that could be akin to a trick of mirrors. Where the idols fall is where they play, and where they play is where they rise again.
Even if you let the dogs Frida and Leo out to run slalom through the mind, and a woman nursing immortality in a vodka tonic reading to them a review of a show long since packed up, except for these words which could be part of the belated, tantric installation, doggy style.
