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"
DE Veyra’s sole acrylic painting from 2024—lengthily titled 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—simply continues the painter’s series on gentrification and democracy, Positively Ugly, to complete a tetralogy as the fourth work of the series.
I.
DE Veyra chose the cityscape and imagery scheme in an earlier painting for the series titled Earthly Paradise (2022) as his jump-off point for his 2024 piece, but veering away from the central point of that former painting. So, what is the present painting about?
1.) While Constant grounding’s urban composition echoes here and there Earthly Paradise’s subtle urban nostalgia for nature, de Veyra’s statement in the present painting—per its title—is centered more on the corporate world’s appropriation of progressive social concerns, whether sincere or false (a conscription if false) or a complex combination of both a sincere and a fake embrace of those. 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 creating a painting about big business’ conscriptions.
2.) 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, subtle ironies aside, of technological advances and Big Business) seems here to have been totally conscripted by the big business world, a conscription expressed in the painting via that photograph of him on a large banner hanging from a humongous postmodern building that supposedly is—or hosts—a museum owned by a kind of Getty whose green building could be read as a neoliberal middle finger of sorts to the “green buildings” of environmentalism. We’ll get to the significance of Hamilton’s presence here soon.
3.) Postmodern building, we said. It would also seem that de Veyra is making a statement here about postmodernism as applied to big business-funded architecture. The artist appears to have read that very application by big business as, from the git-go, already quite an appropriation-cum-conscription of the larger postmodern spirit and philosophy, which spirit and philosophy had been questioning hegemonies of taste or context. Is de Veyra taking Fredric Jameson’s side in critiquing postmodernism as a cultural product that was soon welcomed by capitalism for its seeming salute to the vanishing mediator?
4.) The grey quadcopter drone looking toward (spying on) what could be a private window in a condominium unit extends the painting’s big business-wary statement, as it functions as a symbol of a plutocracy’s presence in every individual’s small existence.
5.) Meanwhile, to continue his inclusion of faces from working-class punk or post-punk music in Positively Ugly, his series on gentrified neighborhoods and the struggle of democracy within them, de Veyra chose to paint a likeness of Chrissie Hynde this time, as a sort of paean to The Pretenders’ Learning to Crawl album (see the “learn to crawl” phrase in the painting’s title). The album is about new beginnings after a devastating hiatus by the band (two members died and had to be replaced), depicting its fresh start (crawl back) message with the lyrical image of an infant learning how to walk. Hynde also named the record in honor of her newborn daughter, Natalie Rae Hynde. But de Veyra uses the learn to crawl metaphor here for people’s constant struggles within a world that would continuously frustrate individuals’ desires for, say, economic and/or intellectual growth. However, we may recall that the intro of one of the songs in the album, “My City Was Gone” (a song about urban development and corporate greed, implicitly about gentrification also), was used by the American far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh in one of his shows, later by other conservative talk show hosts, which fact would present a side note to de Veyra’s depiction of democratic actions (including punk rockers’ democratic actions) within this supposedly plutocracy-run cityscape. We might also recall 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, with the proceeds going to an animal-rights group).
6.) And while the foregrounding buildings in de Veyra’s present 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 qua democratic expressions, strengthening instead the reading that says the graffiti here were sponsored by those very building owners as an act of, again, conscription of the artform.
7.) Furthermore, continuing de Veyra’s inclusion in the series of images of Pop artists or their work, the artist chose this time to visually quote on a middle-positioned white fence space an image of Marilyn Monroe from one of Andy Warhol’s Monroe series, likely to echo Warhol’s ironic stance toward the corporate-run “pop” world (pop art’s irony is in celebrating and critiquing consumer society’s images). However, as a pop symbolist, de Veyra is most likely here putting a spotlight on Monroe as a symbol as well. But a symbol of what? For one, Monroe was a victim of 1950s-‘60s typecasting, about which we must historically remind ourselves that Monroe became 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 an elite neighborhood, with the subject of it (like Hamilton and Hynde) once having a social context that now has been totally lost on the image-utilizing public, removed from any intellectual significance, thanks to the hijacking of postmodernism by capitalism?
8.) It could be said, then, 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! If it still sports a strong “positively ugly” aesthetic, it could simply be from a fake democracy or pluralism manufactured by a plutocratic state!
9.) But wait. Despite the painting title’s allusion to a corporate-run city, does the “positively ugly” thesis actually still, somehow, here continue to have a modicum of success in its promotion of the “positively ugly” democracy of colors inside pluralist neighborhoods (via color dissonance that it strongly displays here)? Promoting, that is, pluralist neighborhoods not hindered by a centralized “corporate-fascist” aesthetic of monochromatic neutrality or managed harmony? Is the artist here expressing hope from 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, sucking you in to a hegemonic West-influenced aesthetics of harmony or uniformity as a consequence of which would be one’s agreement to a “need” for more centralized intervention?
10.) Then, the painting brings in another of de Veyra’s favorite soap brands. As a symbol in a painting with a political intent, it may be that de Veyra wants the soap name to recall what happened in Asturias during the Asturian Revolution of 1934, which was a short-lived leftist revolution launched against the liberal democratic new government established after the deposition of King Alfonso XIII. Despite that government’s having the liberal conservative Niceto Alcalá-Zamora as president, it worried the left that the majority vote in the Spanish general election of 1933 went to the anti-democratic, right-wing CEDA, which soon went on to slowly force its way into Alcalá-Zamora’s administration. Leftist forces decided to launch the revolt, during which preparations the rebels stockpiled rifles and pistols which led to general Emilio Mola to call them the “best-armed” of all the leftist insurrections of interwar Europe. Most of the rifles came from a shipment of arms supplied by Indalecio Prieto, a socialist party moderate, and soon the rifles were landed by the yacht Turquesa at . . . guess where? Pravia. The “heno” (hay or cut grass) in the soap brand’s name easily associates itself with the farm workers of the town. . . . It may be that to de Veyra, the threat of a working-class revolt within an atmosphere of too much influence by the plutocracy, or by radical rightism, is always a logical effect.
11.) Finally, the painting as a glass window depicts a mythical border between the big business-run world “out there” and what’s inside one’s private world. A mythical border, we said, 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 the context of that drone?). [As an aside, de Veyra previously used this painting-as-window format in his paintings Window and Iesus Nazarenus.]
12.) The painting is not necessarily a negation, though, of the positive message of paintings 1 and 2 of the series, or a broadening of the pessimism part of painting 3 of the same series. 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.
13.) There are other minute symbols of democratic “problems” in the painting. For instance, what appears to be a chapel on top of the green museum building already brings in the dynamic, complex relationship between religion and democracy that swings between mutual support and tension.
II.
THIS painting could be said to be about something else, though, as there actually is another angle of appreciation from which the work could be viewed.
1.) The piece may, in fact, be seen as de Veyra’s variation on Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage titled Just 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 (and then the Internet, today’s compound of magazines).
2.) But notice that in Constant grounding, as opposed to Hamilton’s Just what is it..., de Veyra puts his focus on the view outside of the building unit’s window instead of on the unit’s interior. This in effect presents us with a border between that outside threat and the interior’s safety before it finally highlights the two spaces’ connection and disproves their boundary.
3.) Now, what are the other parallels (and differences) between Hamilton’s interior and de Veyra’s window-view of an exterior cityscape? 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 a bikini sitting on the entrance stairs of the orange building in his painting’s foreground.
Detail from Constant grounding . . .
4.) And instead of a new vacuum cleaner (in Hamilton’s collage a Hoover Constellation), de Veyra presents to us another kind of “constellation,” a 21st-century quadcopter drone. Incidentally, both the vacuum cleaner and the quadcopter use air. And instead of citing a romantic comic-book artist’s work on an interior wall, de Veyra’s painting cites a Pop art 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’s composition presents his window view as being a kind of contemporary TV reality in itself, presenting as well dreamy reflections of the building interior 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 actually 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 (de Veyra’s sphere is round, Hamilton’s Earth is flat). And while Hamilton’s collage features an anonymous Victorian man’s portrait, de Veyra here presents Hamilton’s portrait itself as his “image from the past.” 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 vs. something truly in the air? or theoretical-commerce journals as being ad flyers?). 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.
5.) Meanwhile, it’s true that Hamilton’s collage presents us with a façade of a cinema theater outside his room-window view. And though the primary story in the piece is about what is going on inside that quiet room, there are also storytellers outside the window, telling us what is going on there, although they’re also inside that cinema, which is its own technological room. De Veyra’s window of a painting presents itself as the vertical movie screen already, carrying with it more questions about the outside than the inside (a movie night scene sucking you into its reality via the darkened room). A movie scene complete with (potentially) moving images—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 implied movement of the people and the blue car and the bicycle on its lane below, could the clouds on the towers’ horizon in de Veyra’s painting also be moving, complete with lightning? . . . But wait. De Veyra’s cinematic window to the world outside also presents us with a window to the world inside with that center hole in the green building that seems to allude to glass-walled upper floor lobbies inside buildings. Ultimately, de Veyra’s narrators are mostly indoors looking outside, here, and in that possible lobby in the museum building, narrating to us all things that’s going on outside, but really more telling of what’s inside the heads of the storytellers, the painting’s viewers.
THE painting premiered in mid-March 2024 at White Walls Gallery, La Fuerza Plaza, Makati, in a tribute show for painter Nestor Vinluan on the occasion of his 75th birthday. The show involved 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 show gave each participating artist the freedom to carry their own familiar statements, and de Veyra was invited to participate as one of the former students of the painter-teacher.
The painting had its second public appearance on 19 September 2026 at a tribute show for Alwin Reamillo at Altro Mondo Creative Space, which involved artists who shared Reamillo’s obsessions with memory and history as well as theme-treatments like the depiction of conflicting meanings of certain symbols, the communality of memory, and continuity between “frames” of symbols that appeared disparate.