Agnes Arellano’s erotic dance of sculpture

It’s not the first time I’m seeing the work of Agnes Arellano, whose “Salome: Homage to Juan” was recently on view at The Crucible Gallery Megamall. Somewhere in the house are two sculpted stoneware pipes, miniature gems both, one of which was given by the artist herself. The other is from Krip Yuson, in whose garden foyer in Pasig there’s a large sculpture by AA that features a progression of three women, which image was used as cover for the third issue of Caracoa poetry journal back in the ’80s, a special issue on women’s poetry.

Now AA is no slouch when it comes to shaping things out of stone or clay, the finished work issuing forth as if detritus from a half finished dream, the viewer still able to taste the shape and contours of the rough material. The homage to her uncle architect is itself for the asking, and the artist explains that she took photos of her celebrated kin’s nude impressionist paintings on a mobile phone and worked from there. Arellano of the Post Office and old Congress building, to Arellano of the cast marble erotica in series of eights, infinity standing alongside the best of them where Jung meets Jong in Mandaluyong.

The myth is of course biblical in origin, how the dancing queen of yore requested Herod or some such king for the head of John the Baptist after dancing the dance of her life, or at least one such version goes, and the besotted king could not help but comply and give her, ah, head. To say that Salome literally saved the last dance for San Juan Bautista would be understatement of the first order, but seeing how AA has transposed this myth into the title piece of her latest show, with the dancer cradling the severed head as if to give suck, that can only be revolution eros on the far side of blasphemy, a cautionary tale of how we can sometimes lose our head for some tail.

That the Arellanos’ ancestral place is San Juan should not be lost on the viewer either, the former town now a city that once was the site of the Pinaglabanan Galleries, melting pot of artists, writers, poets in the last century before it burned down in another act of symbology and suspected, if unconscious, immolation. For what is art if it can’t be burned down in order to build again?

“First Thing I See in the Morning” is another piece of enduring wonder, the woman’s back facing the viewer as if the ocean itself were at hand. Seeing how the live cadena de amor snakes down the small of the subject’s back could be the stuff of poetry, the furies coming up empty when morning has broken on the sea of her back. If she somehow turns to face you that would be the end of imagining, or darkness encroaching, whatever comes first.

“Untitled” has another beauteous big breasted woman riding on a monkey-like man, perhaps to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ Monkey Man, and here the rider’s face is turned away as if shy to give us the privilege of witnessing such ecstasy, and the monkey cannot help but revert to the ancient beast in him. Nery Naig and Chito Miranda have nothing on this cast marble, though the acrobatics and calisthenics in AA’s work could be reminiscent of the pair’s: “I am just a monkey man/I’m glad you are a monkey woman, too.”

“Zapatos” and “Smoking Juanita Angel” could be representing one and the same woman, or at the very least twins, for both in their bosomy brightness have the same teasing demeanor, on the brink of fetish and suggestion. The smoke indeed tends to get in the viewer’s eyes when catching glimpses of symmetrically curved feet in shoes, notwithstanding the occasional calluses that are scars of desire

“Tempesta” recalls less the play of Shakespeare than the destructive Yolanda, here the fury offering a side view of generous mammaries, the hair appearing windswept to the point of bedraggled as if rudely interrupted from, ah, riding out the storm. “Venus” is a sidewinded tribute to the mythic goddess, the obverse coin of Salome because unlike other representations in art, she’s got her head on.

“Susana and the Elders” was the only one I didn’t capture on my mobile phone, for some reason. Modesty, shyness, conscience, the naked truth is somewhere out there, and in here deep in Xtlan as well.

Salome certainly it is the sexiest assembly of art works in 2013, and offers a philosophy that man or humans are by nature polygamous; whoever invented monogamy must have wanted to save all the wild sex for himself. There’s grace and restraint too here, though, the secret is in being discreet about where all the wild things are. Light a flame and watch it burn.