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 (a conscription if false) or a complex combination of both; here, therefore, is perhaps the artist’s reversal from his totally positive attitude toward those multi-colored buildings in the background in Earthly Paradise, towards a painting about conscription.
    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 totally conscripted by the big business world, a conscription expressed via that photograph of him on a large banner hanging from a humongous 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 seems to read that very application as already quite an appropriation-cum-conscription, from the git-go, of the larger postmodern spirit and philosophy questioning hegemonies of taste. The drone with a camera looking toward (spying on) what could be a private window in a condominium unit extends that statement, functioning as a symbol of plutocracy's presence in every individual’s small existence. Is de Veyra quoting Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernism? 
   Meanwhile, to continue his inclusion of faces from working-class punk or post-punk music in his series on gentrification, de Veyra here chose to paint a likeness of Chrissie Hynde, as a salute to The Pretenders’ Learning to Crawl album (see the “learn to crawl” phrase in the painting’s title). Given that the intro of one of the songs in that Pretenders album, “My City Was Gone,” was used by the far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh in one of his shows, later by other conservative talk show hosts, the allusion presents a side note to de Veyra’s depiction of democratic actions (including punk rockers' democratic actions) within his supposedly plutocracy-run cityscape. This recalls de Veyra’s painting of a graffiti image of what could pass for a John Lydon likeness 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 that bit of her music in his show). And 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, they appear to be owned by individuals or families wealthier than the owners of the smaller buildings in the series’ previous paintings, thus lessening the plausibility of the same proposition that says the graffiti on these buildings are from the buildings’ owners’ choice to allow graffiti as democratic expressions, strengthening instead the reading that says the graffiti here were sponsored by those building owners as an act of, again, conscription of the artform.
    Furthermore, continuing de Veyra’s inclusion in the series of images of Pop artists or their work, 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 perhaps also to remind us of Monroe’s being one of the first to fight corporate marketing’s decisions through her own public-image management venture). But could this Monroe graffiti also be here to represent mere-glamour graffiti sanctioned by the elite neighborhood, with the subject of it (like Hamilton and Hynde) once having a social context that’s now totally lost on the image-utilizing public as a whole and removed from any intellectual significance?
    It could be said that Constant grounding, as a painting about conscription, is the painting in de Veyra’s gentrification series that totally negates the “positively ugly” thesis of the series’ earlier paintings!
    But wait! Despite the painting title’s allusion to a corporate-run city, color-wise de Veyra does still, in fact, continue here his promotion of the “positively ugly” democracy of colors inside pluralist neighborhoods (sometimes resulting in color dissonance, as it strongly does here), pluralist neighborhoods, that is, not hindered by a centralized “corporate-fascist” aesthetic of monochromatic neutrality or managed harmony. Is the artist here expressing hope with the sheer presence of that positive color dissonance? Or is he presenting to us a challenge, asking: are the resultant colors here, in this corporate-run world, somehow still positively ugly to you, the viewer, or just ugly, period, therefore needing more centralized intervention?
    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, yes, as the latter interior world may actually not be free from that former panoramic influence (especially if one is already living within one of these gentrified structures and neighborhoods governed by a corporate system; remember that drone?). [As an aside, De Veyra previously used this painting-as-window format in his paintings Window and Iesus Nazarenus.]
    The painting is not necessarily a negation, though, of paintings 1 and 2 of the series and a broadening of the pessimism part of painting 3 of the same. Its ideal function in the series, in so far as it might still positively belong to it, would be as a mere presentation of caveats to society about what could be hiding behind the appearances of democratic landscapes.

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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 puts his focus on the view outside of the building unit’s window instead of on the unit’s interior, which in effect presents us with a border between that outside threat and the interior safety before finally highlighting those two spaces’ connection and disproving thus their boundary.
    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 described 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 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.