Art had long abandoned its work of just proffering beauty and truth. In a fraught world, its work had been confused and has been rather tasked to do by the bidding of its wielder when they try to own it like the whore of Babylon. They say we are at this inevitable irreversible stage of decadence, unabated consumption, irrepressible depravity. What do artists have to do with all this? Are they party to this complicity?

The wages for their labors have always been paid by who’s in power - the church, the newly-minted mercantile class of the Renaissance, the Medicis, titled royals who use their empire as their Costco and Kidzoona, and now CEOs of app start-ups and hedge funders of extractive industries; And we exalt at their validation in brick and mortar imaginariums.

They say it was, is, necessary, as to reflect the times they have lived in, but it is rather a world that is their oyster, a manifest of the triumph of the will. Movements that have characterized art periods in (Western) art history - have they really been natural impetuses borne out of artists’ drive to push possibilities or rather the drive of the invisible testicular hands of capital? Who really pushes what?

Socio-political analyst Max Haiven succinctly puts it as :
“The financiers of Wall Street or the City of London or Shanghai or Frankfurt believe that, like artists, they are bringing their creativity into the world and manifesting their will, in this same romantic image that we have of artists. Although when capitalists make mistakes you get global warming, nuclear war, reactionary authoritarian governments.”

Laocoon unheeded, the hydra is actually an Ouroboros, a never-ending snake game, postponing the inevitable tail-biting. Who holds the mirror to this and finds instead a gorgon frozen? I guess, ugly times equals ugly art, eh?

Dean Kissick, co-curator of a show in Nahmad Contemporary NY, and mirror wielder says :
“If an artist’s work is a reflection of their experiences in the world, inevitably, the work’s aesthetics will match that reality….. we live in ugly times, ugly paintings can offer us a way to confront this ugliness and find beauty in it.”

To which in mischief and glib Umberto Eco assents to : “Ugliness is more fun than beauty.”

To which this “ugliness” seems to get a free-for-all free pass in the ever persistent medium and platform of painting. Eco’s tomic treatise, rather meandering on “ugliness” within the changing canon of this medium pretty much pisses on Kant’s universalism of aesthetics, for to ascertain beauty is to have detachment, cold cold detachment. In contrast to ugliness that has no similar standard aesthetic judgment for it, it rather appeals much to our senses, invoking instantaneous disgust, repulsion and wonder. Ah, but then there is the clincher, that “ugliness” can be rendered beautifully. Consider Chaim Soutine’s rotting meat, or Jusepe de Ribera’s bearded mother brazenly nursing an infant, or Lucian Freud’s pockmarked, cellulite-ridden fleshly bodies. A quality that has no set standard, or that which affects so intimately, is pretty tricky. Yet it appeals much to the carnal, its viscerality lends so well to viscous paint.It may however be the ultimate challenge for the paint and its painter.

One of the participating artists of this exhibit, Raul Rodriguez recalls the time when Roberto Chabet introduced them to the idea of the ‘ugly’ as a turn-around from a conceptual attitude to a more painterly approach in art making. As a painting student in Chabet’s class in UPCFA, their first plate was to make a “bad painting” which was to him was very counterintuitive (1980s). It was also the period of those crazy German guys usually lumped together under the Neue Wilde when “de-skilling” was rather a “skill”, a virtue even in approaching painting as an attitude leaning rather on the punk, the counter-canon. It is “a shedding of an old skin, a kind of alienation that calls everything into question”, as German painter Charline von Heyl would say. For Rodriguez, it was “Chabet’s way of saying that painting could be a dying discipline unless it turns its bowels out for reexamination.”

It is rather a curious mix that curator RM De Leon has gathered for this exhibit. From a motley generation but coherently all painterly in their own way, quietly thriving in their persistence -
Rodriguez’s work problematizes the rhetorics and history of painting, while Villanueva intuits 7play and happenstance in his practice; De Leon breaks and re-creates forms in mixing pictorial elements from print media and gesturely marks; Achacoso divinates apocryphal symbols that primordiate the abstract; Jumalon’s portraits tacitly illustrates the tenuous process of memory, where facial features are stenographed into dashes, strokes, dollops, and smears in distilling the wavering essence of their persons.

Painters all, for certain, they are. Yet, do not fit a rigid rubric. They whiz and sail through tides, where they maybe dragons, naked emperors or vain corporate men.

Exhibition notes by Lena Cobangbang