Barefoot in the head
May 19, 2006 | 12:00am
Paolo Lerma isn’t one for explaining what goes on in his paintings. According to him, he’s got already much trouble explaining what goes on in his own head much more than his canvas. If pressed on the matter though of explaining his work, he’s reluctant and will usually only utter three key words – "chaos", "life" and "difficult" – and riff on them like a cold turkey Charlie Parker. "I just paint what I feel," he shares, in a rare moment.
Fair enough.
But if your paintings are capable of unsettling furniture – both physical and mental – it makes one wonder what mood Paolo is in when he paints.
Gallery Medusa owner/curator Gino Tioseco tells me that the first time he placed Paolo’s work at the gallery space in preparation for the upcoming exhibit three of his chairs broke. "I hung a couple and leaned the rest on the walls," he says. "The next day they collapsed." He assures me that there was no prior stress on the furniture he could attribute their sudden demise to. Of course, any number of explanations – several of them admittedly more probable – might be the case; but it somehow provides an apt metaphor for the mind-shifts that occur whenever one sees the paintings that make up Paolo’s first one-man exhibit fittingly titled, Chaos Theory.
Before anything else, Paolo’s work is disconcertingly honest. Each painting drips blood, each stroke on its surface intense like that of a slashed wrist. Grotesque faces grimace and stare out of "Apes at the Windows" – a painting that suggests an inner turmoil that only an evolved simian is capable of. Instead of lips, one of the faces has the word "love" scrawled on it while "liar" hovers above like a thought balloon. Another work titled, "The Lamps of Her Eyes" has the word "babae" scrawled on its side. Of course, these suggest that the works have personal significance to the artist. Tellingly, the execution is harsh.
The incandescent expressions alone on Paolo’s painted faces are shock enough, as if caught on a snapshot at the precise moment the atom bomb hit Hiroshima. The effect is both startling and frightening – a picture of Paolo’s own apocalypse.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote that, "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void, but out of chaos: the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form, dark shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself." More than a century later, fellow science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss comments that the act of doing one’s art – when not for commercial purposes – is "to order one’s confusion, to strengthen one’s communication with oneself."
Glorious in its crudeness, wild with passion, the paintings of Paolo ring true — a quality of talent sadly absent in most local exhibitions today. Paolo himself is reticent and just shakes off any question of how he would rate his work, as if by answering it would be missing the point. He chooses not to dwell like a famous opium-eater because "the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by words."
No words, then.
And no exit.
Paolo Lerma’s Chaos Theory will open this coming Wednesday, May 24, at 4 p.m. at the Gallery Medusa, 120 Capt. Manzano St., Pinaglabanan, San Juan, MM. Telephone number is 725-9285.
Send comments and reactions to erwin.romulo@gmail.com
Fair enough.
But if your paintings are capable of unsettling furniture – both physical and mental – it makes one wonder what mood Paolo is in when he paints.
Gallery Medusa owner/curator Gino Tioseco tells me that the first time he placed Paolo’s work at the gallery space in preparation for the upcoming exhibit three of his chairs broke. "I hung a couple and leaned the rest on the walls," he says. "The next day they collapsed." He assures me that there was no prior stress on the furniture he could attribute their sudden demise to. Of course, any number of explanations – several of them admittedly more probable – might be the case; but it somehow provides an apt metaphor for the mind-shifts that occur whenever one sees the paintings that make up Paolo’s first one-man exhibit fittingly titled, Chaos Theory.
Before anything else, Paolo’s work is disconcertingly honest. Each painting drips blood, each stroke on its surface intense like that of a slashed wrist. Grotesque faces grimace and stare out of "Apes at the Windows" – a painting that suggests an inner turmoil that only an evolved simian is capable of. Instead of lips, one of the faces has the word "love" scrawled on it while "liar" hovers above like a thought balloon. Another work titled, "The Lamps of Her Eyes" has the word "babae" scrawled on its side. Of course, these suggest that the works have personal significance to the artist. Tellingly, the execution is harsh.
The incandescent expressions alone on Paolo’s painted faces are shock enough, as if caught on a snapshot at the precise moment the atom bomb hit Hiroshima. The effect is both startling and frightening – a picture of Paolo’s own apocalypse.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote that, "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void, but out of chaos: the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form, dark shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself." More than a century later, fellow science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss comments that the act of doing one’s art – when not for commercial purposes – is "to order one’s confusion, to strengthen one’s communication with oneself."
Glorious in its crudeness, wild with passion, the paintings of Paolo ring true — a quality of talent sadly absent in most local exhibitions today. Paolo himself is reticent and just shakes off any question of how he would rate his work, as if by answering it would be missing the point. He chooses not to dwell like a famous opium-eater because "the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by words."
No words, then.
And no exit.
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