Messengers of the Sacred and the Profane
I walk into the room and am greeted by a compelling 12.5-foot painted canvas “sculpture” of a tattooed-colossus-pyramid-golem in one corner and an eight-foot diptych of woodland creatures resembling stuffed bears FAO Schwarz would never carry.
Enter the worlds of Dexter “Dex” Fernandez and Froilan Calayag.
Aged 25 and 27, Dex and Froilan are among the young artists gracing a very volatile and hot avante-garde Filipino art scene exploding into a phenomenon all its own.
When I first met Froilan four years back he was living on Torres Street with Dex and fellow artists Lynard, Ryan Rubio, Joey Cobcobo, Andy Garcia, Neil Pasilan, and a very devoted askal by the name of “Wild.”
The Torres Boys have long since disbanded and now Froilan and Dex share a residence in Marikina with Andy.
Dex and Froilan began to play around with art during high school. Influenced by a neighbor friend who was designing covers for pocket book romances, Froilan picked up a brush and began to paint images he had carried around since his childhood days of cloud watching.
Both Dex and Froilan eventually went on to finish at the Technological University of the Philippines (TUP).
Both recently had a collaborative show at Tâlâ Gallery that also featured their individual works, including a piece entitled “FTW (F@#*! the World)” which represents their frustrations.
FTW can be taken as “to use the world and take what you can get” or “I turn my back on the world and all its hurts and try to create an alternative world.”
The show also featured respective individual works.
Dex showed “I Feel Like Nausea,” a sculpture of canvas on wood featuring a gargantuan pyramid man with tattoo-like graffiti of disorder and chaos, and “Hi,” another larger-than-life canvas, wood, and rubber sculpture of a two-faced creature whose body is stained with depictions of house-like structures and fantastical creatures.
Dex’s work is defined by elements of color, geometrical shapes, irreverent symbols and gestures, and chaos.
Froilan’s “Here Comes Hope with Soft Chaos” is distinguished by his dreamscapes: fairytale woods with cavorting bear, monkey, dog, and lizard, like imaginary creatures in vivid colors of reds and yellows.
“Hope” is depicted as soft fuzzy creatures tumbling down in a lazy blissful pace and nonsensical in its seeming lack of plan, rhyme or reason — all with purpose of a new dawn.
While Dex and Froilan admire modern artists like Basquiat, Cy Twombly and Keith Haring, they still look to the old masters with admiration and respect.
Yet they feel their generation of artists have their own pulse with a fire and purpose coming from a creative process. Dex sees his art as selfish and leaves it to the viewer to interpret the work. It doesn’t have an agenda; it is art for art’s sake.
For him, art is something spiritual in nature that becomes a refuge to run to in moments of confusion and despair, in order to reenergize for his return to reality.
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