THIS painting, solicited for the group show titled Earthly Paradise and eponymously titled Earthly Paradise, echoes the concerns of de Veyra’s 2018 painting The New Middle Class and the Remaking of Our SoHo, Our Spray-Painted Little Section of the City.

    While likewise treating of a gentrification process in a fictional urban neighborhood, it also tries to comment on the concept of “paradise” as a human construct standing in for happiness (as per the show’s need).

    But, firstly, like The New Middle Class this painting is talking about a neighborhood that continues to sport its people’s graffiti competing with an emerging bunch of advertising graffiti or imagery directed at a more affluent or upwardly mobile market.

    According to the painter, the brown building on the painting’s right, although representative of products of a smaller scale of gentrification, is echoing the aesthetic taste of larger-scale big-business projects, while the green building on the painting’s left represents those older structures still accommodating graffiti and other democratic voices.

    As for the painting’s other statement, while both sides of Earthly Paradise seem to be pointing to a desire for elements of nature, it is the painting’s left side that emulates a more art-loving, more populist sort of lively aesthetic taste, with the painting’s right side (to the viewer’s left) espousing the more conservative approach toward this desire.

    Overall, however, inclusive of the buildings at the back, the painting seems to side with the populism of the building on the painting’s left, in seeming to say that this populist democratic aesthetic need not be exclusive to the lower-middle-class inhabitants of dilapidated buildings, that it can also be manifest in the taste of super-wealthy owners of buildings (see the green and pink buildings behind) who can choose to ignore whatever sort of aesthetic fascism there is, like the aesthetic fascism being peddled by the conservative brown building foregrounding the painting’s lower right.

    Finally, as for this painting’s having an uncomfortable sort of harmony, like in The New Middle Class, once again, that is the very point of de Veyra’s series on an ideal gentrification development as well as this current painting’s point: the artist wants to avoid creating what might appear as an intentionally unified or controlled color harmony. After The New Middle Class, de Veyra wants to demonstrate in Earthly Paradise anew that it is possible for a gentrification process to proceed without the “aesthetic fascism” of one single large corporation or influential aesthete, that gentrification can maintain a semblance of aesthetic democracy, and among all the classes in this case. Furthermore, that even if this aesthetic turns out to be ugly to certain tastes, this can also be touted as the positively ugly aesthetics of democracy, with emphasis on positively, which touting can push to change minds simply from its pride.

    Again, within that aesthetic where certain combines might be tagged as ugly or tacky, the purported ugliness perceived could actually be presented as something prettier than any homogeneous brown condominium building-front inspired by the aesthetics of a uniformity-hungry corporate or government taste, this latter aesthetics what the artist has called “a seed of a much-larger tree of aesthetic fascism that could be coursed in its fascist development through the culture-promotion of plutocracies.”

    Minor details: While in The New Middle Class de Veyra painted a Takashi Murakami lookalike, he painted here what could pass for an image of Andy Warhol, to continue his paean to Pop art’s statements of irony concerning progress. And while in The New Middle Class he painted a Dexter Holland lookalike, here he painted a generic singing face referencing punk culture. One might ask if this image could have been derived from a photo of Johnny Rotten. The artist would welcome that visual reading, because then a Johnny Rotten making an appearance in his painting could be a symbol for democracy’s fragility, a fragility due to sympathies for the working class among celebrities that nevertheless can be sucked in at one point or another by neoliberal and rightist propaganda or philosophies that purport to service democratic working-class needs.

    So, to review, as in The New Middle Class, de Veyra is trying to display here what he calls the “positive ugliness” of democracy, but this time involving both the middle and the wealthier classes.

    Other features in this genre painting-cum-cityscape painting that repeats features in The New Middle Class include: the absent view of the sky, meant to underline the concept of city economics and environments as a prison (wage slavery, light pollution, etc.); a fire hydrant (to continuously poke on the self-awareness of materialism); faces approximating certain people (from punk culture and Pop art) and people from diverse races; and another soap brand’s logo.

    Not to forget, though: while the show only meant to comment on present-day nature and environmentalist concerns, de Veyra’s Earthly Paradise added a comment on the “paradise” utopia of illiberal gods into the mix.