Agent Fabricateur

Leo Abaya, visual artist, professor at the UP College of Fine Arts, production designer for film and stage, is an individual of many interests and one overwhelming pursuit: he seeks to understand. “I’m interested in history,” he says, “Not out of nostalgia, but because I want to understand the present. You cannot understand the present by looking at it some more — it’s in a flux.”

Last Friday, a preview of his forthcoming exhibit in Singapore opened at Britania Art Projects in Cubao, Quezon City. Entitled “Fabricana,” these new works offer a glimpse into the workings of Abaya’s mind.

It’s a highly active mind: ideas spinning off into other ideas, references within references, wordplay, symbols dancing on their heads, imagery dense with meaning. You might view these paintings as a brain scan of the artist, but a disciplined and rigorous one, each neuron aware of its context.

I asked Leo to talk about the process of creating the works for this exhibit. Not “What does it mean?” — the works speak for themselves — but more “How did this come to be? What was going on in your mind?”

Conversations with Leo are always a blast — afterwards you feel like you’ve gained a couple of IQ points. (Whenever I look at contemporary art and ask, “Is it art, or am I being fooled?” it is Leo I usually consult.)

“Fabricana” is an invented word that sounds like Filipiniana or Americana. It connotes invention, manufacture, and everything that is made, including history.

When preparing for an exhibit, Leo starts with basic concepts. “I wanted to do something with fabric. I read this book on the history of textiles, and it covers the tradition of textiles all over the world; how life, culture and belief systems are all manifested in fabric. But those fabrics are precious, and I got to thinking, ‘What about the cheap fabrics sold in Kamuning? These are the fabrics we actually use today. What do they say about us?’

“Many fabrics available today are cheap, machine-made, mass-produced, accessible to everyone,” he notes, “and I’m supposed to be doing fine art.” Fabric has been part of his life as a production designer for films. “It’s something that led me to pursue art formally. In film, fabric is used in support of a character. In artwork it has to stand by itself.”

This thinking led to the issue of high art versus commerce. “What is the essential materialist difference between the process of putting pigment on a surface because I have some grand narrative to relate, and the process used on the making of prints on a dress? There is no difference,” Leo declares. “It does not come from the material. It’s our perspective that varies: remove that and it’s the same. In the future, what happens? All of our perspectives are removed. How will people a hundred years from now look at all this fabric? So you start with the material.”

The next step was to consider his approach. “I’ve always done mixed media. So I decided there would be no hierarchy: I would use the traditional fine art process of oil painting, with printing and fabrics as appropriate. And I wanted to create something pretty. What’s wrong with that?”

He had a stash of fabrics that were candidates for the artworks. Instead of painting them, he subjected them to an industrial process, dyeing. At the same time he had the idea of putting small stories, vignettes, into frames. While looking at vintage pictures of the Philippines, he was struck by their common theme of bondage. This led to the triptych, “Anniversary Waltz.” “Someone might ask, ‘How is this image of imported milk about bondage?’ We don’t have it here because it’s imported and that’s a kind of bondage,” he says. “Instead of consuming something you have here, you have to import it.

“I played with the idea of camouflage alluding to stealth. Then it occurred to me that this is really about economics. It grew from there. Hence the words ‘Bell Trade Act’ on the frames. Bondage stunts one’s growth, hence the image of the little people.”

The image of the reclining woman was “appropriated shamelessly” from Velasquez, a painter he greatly admires. He combined it with the photograph of a nude model, and found that the two images could be combined into an elemental Adam and Eve. “They’re in chains, but they seem to be perversely enjoying it. I changed the mirror into a regency-style mirror, the type used often in American colonial art and furniture.”

As for the fabric in the artwork, “That print is the Kamuning version of toile de Jouy. It talks about pastoral life, how wonderful it is. Contrast that with these banal images of consumer products.”

Another work, “Refranes de Camino,” is a sort of cautionary tale. The main image is a photograph of Benigno Ramos, a mostly forgotten figure in our history, the public servant who founded what was eventually called the Sakdalista movement. The Sakdalistas were the first to support the immediate independence of the Philippines from the United States. “It was made up of farmers, a real grassroots movement. They were about 30,000 strong, and they held a rally. They were massacred.”

Benigno Ramos was tried for sedition and found guilty. “For some reason he was exiled to Japan. The photo upon which this is based was probably taken right after he was found guilty. He is followed by his enigmatic man whose identity we don’t know.” Ramos returned to the Philippines during the Japanese occupation to convince his countrymen that the Japanese had good intentions. “This is a picture of someone who had good intentions,” Leo says. “I framed it as a vignette in this common fabric to denote mock adulation — he’s being iconized, but the frame is cheap. There are images of the five-peso coin on the painting, the coin bearing the image of Aguinaldo — another man with good intentions.”

Benigno Ramos is said to have died in 1946, but no one is really sure: he just vanished from the face of history. “I think that’s where my experience in cinema comes in — the vignette ends in a wipe.

“I’ve realized as I get older that I use a lot of cinematic devices in my work,” he adds. “The repeated image — film consists of repeated images.”

The piece “Daedalus Projects” began as a tablecloth. “I love this print, it’s so baduy,” Leo laughs. “When I looked closely at it, I thought it had an interesting pattern — rectilinear and curvilinear, arranged on a grid, yet soft. I scanned it and realized I had a compositional matrix. That tiny image became this center. It’s like a cinematic close-up.

“Then I needed to find a way to show the source of the composition, which is not really mine. So I used the actual fabric. The problem was how to put it together in a way that makes visual sense. Just because it’s my intent doesn’t mean it works: I don’t believe in licentious presentation. An artist is trained in the way of putting things together.”

The compositional source and the painting couldn’t just be placed side by side; the painting has to look like it’s coming out of the fabric.

“So I used perspective. It looks like a rocket, or wings. I remembered Daedalus, who created wings — he was an artist. Then it came to me: Daedalus! A creator. In our history, who did we create that in a way defined our recent history?”

The piece offers some answers: Ramon Magsaysay, a.k.a. Magsaysay Is My Guy; General Douglas MacArthur of “I shall return” fame; Nora Villamayor who transmogrified into Nora Aunor the Superstar; Joseph Ejercito who became Erap Estrada. “They are all projects. There’s some form of construction to soften, worsen, or demonize them. And they are all within a larger fabric. They can go around but they can’t get out,” he says.

“My logic here is, I’m making a pattern which I could actually do in acrylic, but I will use the time-honored oil and all its associations with traditional painting to paint a tablecloth pattern.”

Of course viewers will have many different interpretations of the works, and a lot of what we’ve been talking about will be lost in the seeing. But these details make the experience of “Fabricana” richer and more intense. They deepen understanding, and that’s what Leo Abaya is about.

“Fabricana” opens at the Utterly Art Gallery in Singapore on Nov. 19.