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POST-COLONIAL RUBBISH
Pablo Gallery
BGC, Philippines
09.30.2017
In Postcolonial Rubbish, Bjorn Calleja presents nothing less than a singular contemporary artist’s manifesto. These quietly daring paintings are amalgams of observation and imagination: everything here is both strange and familiar, both processed and raw. This is the world we inhabit, Calleja seems to say, a postcolonial world populated by hybrids—the hybrid is the new normal, one might quip—where mindlessness is so ubiquitous as to evoke the feeling of what is by default, home.
Home, to the artist, is ordinary tension, and by that logic, we are always home and never quite. In the titular painting of the show, we see a section of wall of pink bricks. This wall, however, is an abstraction of a wall, as from a certain angle the bricks appear to be plots, with the spaces between bricks resembling sidewalks. However one reads the ground image, here is space for growth, and instead of molds, what we see are plant-like, humanoid forms. Not only does Calleja suggest that humanity grows between the cracks; he also asks whether walls have an inside and an outside, and if there is a palpable difference between the two.
According to the artist, his new paintings emerged from a three-year hiatus from painting, a period of introspection during which he yearned to locate himself and his work in this contemporary time. Out of that experience, too, came the motif that characterizes the style of his middle period: the appearance of minute, humanoid forms. “It was late last year when I painted the first of this series accidentally,” Calleja said. “I just needed to place tiny people on one of the paintings that I was working on and realized that what I was doing worked for me in a lot of ways, not just aesthetically.”
With the play of distances, Calleja creates a choreography out of viewership: his paintings ask us to stand from afar, to step closer, then step farther again. This new work makes a rhythm out of scale. While the humanoid forms are always interesting in themselves—a human made entirely of legs, for example, or one that is an eyeball from the waist up—what makes the innovation important is the way they exist both in the pictorial premise of the painting, as well as in a separate, flat plane of their own constitution. Note how in City, City Won’t You Calm Down, the size of the figures is constant, whether they are closest to the viewer (such as the protesters on the street) or farthest (such as the Christ and devil figure on a rooftop, high up to the right). And yet, it all makes sense, or rather—and here lies the artist’s philosophical gambit: the sense of existence is double. We exist and locate ourselves by paradox, therefore: here as well as not.
To say that these new paintings owe a measure of debt to Hieronymous Bosch as well as Pieter Bruegel the Elder is by no means to belittle their newness. Firstly, Calleja handles the influence to conceptual ends, so that their presence in these paintings is rightly understood as part of the postcolonial haul. Secondly, although the imagery seems to participate in the visualization of a postapocalyptic world, nowhere in these paintings do we see the nonchalant bravado that is the theme’s usual company. Instead, Calleja’s populace of humanoids register as warm judgment, and for all the celebration of the uncanny, the perverse is here rendered as, well, cute. It takes equal parts of bravery and intelligence to make the cute register as idea, and it takes far more to imbue the perverse with the potential for human affection. Tellingly, in the exhibit’s lone installation Man Versus, the tiny figure is heavier than the giant.
Viewing this exhibit at length, one is quietly compelled to ask: What are we doing continuing to be alive? Why do we still live? One possible, hard-earned answer comes in the form of a painting. In it, a mutant, multi-colored flower seems to have bloomed via delapidation, rising like a fountain of paint to the upper edge of the picture. Deep below the petals, a human figure with a cactus for a pet stands in shocked, helpless awe. In the landscape of urban decay, mindless sex and state violence, Calleja ventures that indeed, as in the title of the painting, “Life is probably beautiful.” That the adverb “probably” is there only means that here is a painter who refuses the easy answer, opting instead to continue the search for reason today.
Exhibition notes by Marc Gaba
Pablo Gallery
BGC, Philippines
09.30.2017
In Postcolonial Rubbish, Bjorn Calleja presents nothing less than a singular contemporary artist’s manifesto. These quietly daring paintings are amalgams of observation and imagination: everything here is both strange and familiar, both processed and raw. This is the world we inhabit, Calleja seems to say, a postcolonial world populated by hybrids—the hybrid is the new normal, one might quip—where mindlessness is so ubiquitous as to evoke the feeling of what is by default, home.
Home, to the artist, is ordinary tension, and by that logic, we are always home and never quite. In the titular painting of the show, we see a section of wall of pink bricks. This wall, however, is an abstraction of a wall, as from a certain angle the bricks appear to be plots, with the spaces between bricks resembling sidewalks. However one reads the ground image, here is space for growth, and instead of molds, what we see are plant-like, humanoid forms. Not only does Calleja suggest that humanity grows between the cracks; he also asks whether walls have an inside and an outside, and if there is a palpable difference between the two.
According to the artist, his new paintings emerged from a three-year hiatus from painting, a period of introspection during which he yearned to locate himself and his work in this contemporary time. Out of that experience, too, came the motif that characterizes the style of his middle period: the appearance of minute, humanoid forms. “It was late last year when I painted the first of this series accidentally,” Calleja said. “I just needed to place tiny people on one of the paintings that I was working on and realized that what I was doing worked for me in a lot of ways, not just aesthetically.”
With the play of distances, Calleja creates a choreography out of viewership: his paintings ask us to stand from afar, to step closer, then step farther again. This new work makes a rhythm out of scale. While the humanoid forms are always interesting in themselves—a human made entirely of legs, for example, or one that is an eyeball from the waist up—what makes the innovation important is the way they exist both in the pictorial premise of the painting, as well as in a separate, flat plane of their own constitution. Note how in City, City Won’t You Calm Down, the size of the figures is constant, whether they are closest to the viewer (such as the protesters on the street) or farthest (such as the Christ and devil figure on a rooftop, high up to the right). And yet, it all makes sense, or rather—and here lies the artist’s philosophical gambit: the sense of existence is double. We exist and locate ourselves by paradox, therefore: here as well as not.
To say that these new paintings owe a measure of debt to Hieronymous Bosch as well as Pieter Bruegel the Elder is by no means to belittle their newness. Firstly, Calleja handles the influence to conceptual ends, so that their presence in these paintings is rightly understood as part of the postcolonial haul. Secondly, although the imagery seems to participate in the visualization of a postapocalyptic world, nowhere in these paintings do we see the nonchalant bravado that is the theme’s usual company. Instead, Calleja’s populace of humanoids register as warm judgment, and for all the celebration of the uncanny, the perverse is here rendered as, well, cute. It takes equal parts of bravery and intelligence to make the cute register as idea, and it takes far more to imbue the perverse with the potential for human affection. Tellingly, in the exhibit’s lone installation Man Versus, the tiny figure is heavier than the giant.
Viewing this exhibit at length, one is quietly compelled to ask: What are we doing continuing to be alive? Why do we still live? One possible, hard-earned answer comes in the form of a painting. In it, a mutant, multi-colored flower seems to have bloomed via delapidation, rising like a fountain of paint to the upper edge of the picture. Deep below the petals, a human figure with a cactus for a pet stands in shocked, helpless awe. In the landscape of urban decay, mindless sex and state violence, Calleja ventures that indeed, as in the title of the painting, “Life is probably beautiful.” That the adverb “probably” is there only means that here is a painter who refuses the easy answer, opting instead to continue the search for reason today.
Exhibition notes by Marc Gaba
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