Constant grounding, with which we learn to crawl through the persistent gentrifications of 1) our irony, 2) the semiotics field, even 3) postmodern wokeness itself, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 52" x 24" [RECENTLY LAUNCHED AT A GROUP SHOW AT WHITE WALLS GALLERY, LA FUERZA PLAZA, MAKATI ON 23 MARCH 2024]
LATE in December 2023, White Walls Gallery announced a forthcoming mid-March to early May 2024 group show at its space located at La Fuerza Plaza in Makati. The show was to be a tribute to painter Nestor Vinluan on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and was to involve colleagues and former students of the painter when he was still a University of the Philippines at Diliman, College of Fine Arts, instructor, later professor and dean. The participants’ works would accompany Vinluan’s own pieces; the show did not suggest a theme, i.e., gave each participating artist the freedom to carry their own familiar statements. As one of the former students of the painter-teacher, De Veyra was invited to participate.
De Veyra decided to create and submit the above acrylic painting, which simply continues his series on gentrification and democracy, completing a tetralogy; he later lengthily titled the piece Constant grounding, with which we learn to crawl through the persistent gentrifications of 1) our irony, 2) the semiotics field, even 3) postmodern wokeness itself. The show was launched on 23 March 2024.
De Veyra chose his cityscape and imagery scheme in Earthly Paradise (2022) as his jump-off point for his 2024 piece, but veering away from the central point of that former painting. For while his present composition echoes Earthly Paradise’s subtle urban nostalgia for nature, de Veyra’s statement here centers more on the corporate world’s appropriation of social concerns, whether sincere or false or both types of appropriation (a conscription if false); here, therefore, would be the artist’s sort of reversal from his totally positive attitude toward the multi-colored buildings in the background of his aforementioned earlier painting.
In the present piece, there is the overwhelming presence of Pop-art pioneer Richard Hamilton (painted by de Veyra on 2/8/24), whose representation in art history (as one of the affirmers, his ironies aside, of technological advances and Big Business) seems here to have been conscripted by the big business world, a conscription here expressed via a large banner of him hanging from a postmodern building. It would also seem that de Veyra is making a statement here regarding postmodernism itself as applied to big business-funded architecture, where the artist has read that very application as already quite an appropriation-cum-conscription, from the git-go, of the larger postmodern spirit and philosophy. The drone with a camera looking toward (spying on) what could be a private window in a condominium unit extends that statement’s mood.
Meanwhile, continuing his inclusion of faces from working-class punk or post-punk music in his gentrification series, de Veyra chose to paint a likeness of Chrissie Hynde this time, as a salute to The Pretenders’ Learning to Crawl album (see the “learn to crawl” phrase in the painting’s title). The allusion presents a side note to de Veyra’s depiction of democratic actions within this supposedly plutocracy-run cityscape, given that one of the songs in the abovementioned Pretenders album was used by the far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh in one of his shows. This recalls de Veyra’s painting of a graffiti image of John Lydon in Earthly Paradise, with which the artist aimed to cite Lydon’s move to right-wing politics as a symbol of that gullibility paradox within working-class sympathies inside democracies (Hynde, however, remains a citizen of the left-of-center, despite her allowing the late Limbaugh to continue to use her music for his show). Additionally, while the foregrounding buildings in de Veyra’s painting do try to subtly sport little happy products and actions of democracy within the overwhelmingly gentrifying neighborhood presented, they seem to be owned by individuals or families wealthier than the owners of the smaller buildings in the series’ previous paintings, thus lessening the impact (on society) of their freedom to allow or sponsor graffiti on their buildings.
Furthermore, continuing de Veyra’s inclusion of images of Pop artists or their work in this series, the artist chose to quote this time, on a middle-positioned white fence space, an image from one of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series, obviously to echo Warhol’s ironic stance toward the corporate-run “pop” world, but also to highlight Monroe as one victim of 1950s-‘60s typecasting (and as one of the first to fight corporate marketing’s decisions via her own public-image management venture). However, if this Monroe graffiti is graffiti, is it representative of another mere glamour graffiti, the subject of which (like Hamilton and Hynde) used to have a social context now totally lost on the public?
Yet, despite the painting title’s allusion to a corporate-run city, color-wise de Veyra continues here his promotion of the “positively ugly” democracy of colors inside pluralist neighborhoods (sometimes resulting in color dissonance, as in here), pluralist neighborhoods not hindered by a centralized “corporate-fascist” aesthetic of monochromatic neutrality or managed harmony. Is the artist expressing hope with that, or is he presenting to us a challenge: are the resultant colors positively ugly to you, the viewer, or just ugly, period?
Finally, the painting as a glass window is de Veyra’s depiction of a mythical border between the big business-run world “out there” and what’s inside one’s private world; a mythical border, as the latter world may actually not be free from that former influence (especially if one already lives within one of these gentrified structures oneself). [De Veyra previously used this painting-as-window format in his paintings Window and Iesus Nazarenus.]
BUT there’s another angle of appreciation from which this painting could be approached. The work may, in fact, be viewed as de Veyra’s variation on Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage titled What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? The citing of Hamilton’s work is significant for de Veyra, as many of the painted images in the latter’s paintings were also culled from magazines.
But notice that in Constant grounding, de Veyra put his focus on the view outside of the building unit’s window instead of on the unit’s interior.
Now, what are the parallels (or differences) between Hamilton’s interior and de Veyra’s window-view of an exterior landscape?
First, while the principal template of Hamilton’s collage was an image of a modern sitting-room in an advertisement for Armstrong Floors in Ladies’ Home Journal, which describes the “modern fashion in floors,” de Veyra’s painting subtly implies contemporary flooring materials for sidewalks and plazas/squares. Meanwhile, de Veyra’s graffiti image of Chrissie Hynde with thin arms contrasts with Hamilton’s muscled body builder; de Veyra and then echoes Hamilton’s burlesque woman on a sofa with a tiny image of a woman in bikini sitting on the entrance stairs of the orange building in his painting’s foreground.
Detail from Constant grounding . . .
And instead of a new vacuum cleaner (in Hamilton’s collage a Hoover Constellation), de Veyra presents us with another kind of “constellation,” a 21st-century drone. And instead of citing a romantic comic-book artist’s work on an interior wall, de Veyra cites an image from Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series on a park’s tall wall fence. And while Hamilton’s collage features a TV set, de Veyra presents his window view as a kind of contemporary TV reality in itself, which view presents also dreamy reflections of the building room’s ceiling lights on the window’s glass. An additional realist TV in de Veyra’s composition could be that image of Chrissie Hynde on a building wall, which, instead of being graffiti, could reference contemporary video walls/billboards on city-building exteriors. . . . Then there’s a dome structure on top of de Veyra’s central green building, which echoes Hamilton’s Earth image on his ceiling (the former is round, the latter is flat, get it?). And while Hamilton’s collage features an anonymous Victorian man’s portrait, de Veyra presents Hamilton’s portrait itself as his “image from the past.” While Hamilton’s collage gives us a copy of The Journal of Commerce, founded by telegraph pioneer Samuel F. B. Morse, resting on a chair, de Veyra gives us a different kind of flyer for commerce, a blimp telegraphing its message from the air (chair of theories or lies and half-lies vs. something truly in the air, get it? and theoretical commerce journals as ad flyers, see?). And instead of coming from a tape recorder, the music in de Veyra’s picture could already be coming from the Chrissie Hynde building-wall video, or it could simply be the cool sound coming from the drone outside his window, albeit likely muffled by the window’s glass. Meanwhile, if Hamilton’s collage presents us with a façade of a cinema theater outside his room-window view (the narrators are outside), de Veyra’s window of a painting already presents itself as a movie of questions, complete with moving images—e.g., is the white bird above Chrissie Hynde’s image part of the Hynde graffiti or video, or is it a real bird flying outside the buildings? And apart from the movement of the people and the blue car and the bicycle on its lane below, could the clouds on the towers’ horizon also be moving, complete with lightning? Or is de Veyra’s cinematic window to the world outside also presenting a window to the world inside with that center hole in the green building that seems to allude to cinema theater lobbies inside buildings with glass walls? (The narrators are inside, narrating what’s there outside.)