THIS little piece showed at the 2018 Allegoria group show, titled Allegory of Apathies, is a painting that, despite its intimate size, tries to cover a lot of ground. Basically, though, it’s a depiction of political-power ambition represented by the flying ballistic missile image.
    First of all, the painting is thematically divided into two, a war part and a peace part, or more specifically a “war” sky part and a “peace” bourgeois lower part. It is a bourgeois scene below, consisting of a classy view (from a terrace) of a modernist park with posh modernist landscaping around a fountain area, pool, or pond with black granite. That it is a bourgeois scene is significant (we’ll go to this significance later).
    Now, because of the war-mongering presence above, the lower part would necessarily be seen as a symbol of apathy towards that war-mongering. It must be so, a symbol of apathy towards leaders’ politics and eagerness for war, because it is composed of . . . well, as per the landscape and the objects in it, high-class modernist architecture (note the geometrics of the landscape architecture and the materials of wealth and luxury as indicated by their colors) . . . accompanied by images of (skinny-dipping) freedom, wining, and decor. Now, this apathy in the lower part of the painting is further expressed by the absent reflection on its pool of the flying ballistic missile in the sky; the ballistic missile is not reflected in the pool. So, all this wealth and luxury is not painted here in a positive light, as they usually are in many landscape paintings with this sort of scenery, they have become negative symbols. They’re here as symbols of apathy towards the flying ICBM.
    But the painting actually refers to two apathies. The first apathy in the lower part of the painting we already described above. There is a second apathy here, and it is in the upper part of the work, represented by either a God in the sky or by the in-power warmonger himself who sent that ICBM flying in the sky. But if that second apathy is in that warmonger himself, what is he apathetic towards?
    While we were looking at the apathy in the modernist landscape, we regarded that landscape as negative for being apathetic. Now that we are looking at the apathy of the warmonger and his ICBM, that beauty below now becomes the positive imagery, because it can now be read as that positive beauty (that faces near-future destruction by virtue of a possible retaliation) that the warmonger would seem to be apathetic towards.
    So, the lower part is apathetic to the evil going on above, while the upper part of the painting is apathetic to the beauty of contentment that is everywhere below, the simple luxuries of life below, which here includes a people’s life of wine, topfreedom, and non-political art and architecture.

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BUT we know for a fact that the warmongering of leaders is either due to greed or bigoted arrogance, either of which is a symptom of ambition and ambition’s expansionism. Is not ambition precisely what motors the chest-beating selfishness behind someone’s psychological apathy towards peoples’ love for luxury or simplicity and peace, whether these people or subjects of the warmonger are first-world wealthy people or people of the liberated or contented peasant class? So, we know and understand what makes a man of mighty power apathetic.
    Now, let’s go back to the apathy below and examine the items that would create that kind of apathy. Notice that de Veyra chose to create a bourgeois representation of apathy instead of a peasant-class one in this bottom part of the painting. We might ask now: is the painting’s bourgeois, classy, asymmetrical geometric composition being apathetic also to the more fluid or organic aesthetic compositions of lower-income cultures? Because why did the artist not paint a rural or slum scene instead of a posh hotel terrace scene in the first place? Is it because he thought the lower classes to be only acquiescent to leaderships they can’t beat?
    Okay, let’s go back to the wealthy class’ apathy. We could say that this sort of apathy is not merely apathetic to any oncoming evil at the top . . . it is also apathetic to outsider cultures not seen in the painting’s posh landscape. . . . However, could there be other significances to the painter’s choosing to display a bourgeois view of apathy instead of a slum view of apathy towards goings-on in government and geo-politics? Well, we might try asking this instead, to highlight that last sentence in the preceding paragraph: is it possible that the painter is here already pointing to the apathy among the lower-income class cultures even without having to include them in the picture?—because, indeed, one can read an elliptical meaning to their absence here qua enablers of the wealthy class’ apathy. So, by excluding elements of the lower class in the picture, one could say that the painter is challenging this class to consider its own apathy towards the politics and economics behind classy geometric art and architecture. Perhaps this apathy of theirs is what has led them to unknowingly help perpetuate their own culture’s economic and political inferiority, thus a self-assigned inferiority, inside their territory’s existing plutocracy. In fact, that sense of lower-class inferiority often aspires to climb up a bit on occasion, thus some middle-income to lower-income people’s penchant for vacationing in cheap hotels, just to experience a bit of wealth and luxury for a brief moment. And that would, in fact, be another expression of apathy towards the aesthetics of plutocracies.
    But, wait—if that is also the painter’s statement here, surely the lower classes cannot see this when many of them can’t even understand allegorical statements of this kind in paintings. And how could the artist expect them to listen, knowing that paintings like this are seldom accessible to the lower classes, too; even if they’re to be displayed as public art, again, the lexicon of their allegory-making might not be that accessible, education-training-wise. . . . So, definitely the lower classes are outside the audience that de Veyra was trying to address here! Is it possible, then, that he was agitating not the lower classes but his primary audience, which would be the galleries’ middle- or upper-class audience? And if they are the audience being addressed, what was the artist asking them to consider?
    In the painting, de Veyra is asking his audience to consider the middle- and upper-class’ apathy not only to things going on upstairs (the evil of leaders or their own class’ contentment) but also their apathy to things going on downstairs (the suffering of outcasts and outsiders to the upper middle class’ apolitical aesthetics). Why is it important for the middle- and upper-classes to consider their apathies towards what’s going on above and below? It’s simple. Because that missile threat on the upper part of the painting could be the threat of a future communist or neo-fascist or theonomic revolution or triumph, which revolution or triumph would be welcomed by the enthusiasm of discontented or angry people downstairs (the hotel’s servants washing the upper middle class’ linens) who would latch on to parties other than those in the status quo.