FIRST shown in a group show titled Earthly Paradise, this painting was eponymously titled Earthly Paradise by de Veyra to comment on 1) the “paradise on earth” idea, in the painting’s case set in a gentrified urban setting, and 2) how the realization of this vision relates to the seemingly distant ideals of democracy.
    For the depiction of the latter painterly comment, the painting continues the Pop Symbolism of de Veyra’s 2018 painting The New Middle Class and the Remaking of Our SoHo, Our Spray-Painted Little Section of the City. That earlier painting subtly tackled the latent struggles of a middle class-driven and more democratic form of gentrification against emerging big business-developed ones.

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I. The painting qua comment on an “earthly paradise” concept existing in cities
    As a desire for harmony with nature, in this case city-based, “earthly paradise” (both the often left-leaning environmentalist concept and the religious one) can actually be attained through a dictatorship or a plutocracy/timocracy, being an idea that can breed fanaticism toward a political or religious movement’s propagandizing a way to achieve the flawless society that would deliver that promise. After all, “earthly paradise” is a utopia with an idealized view of a garden of absolute peace and abundance, if you will, that does not specify a sole ethos for its achievement.
    Although the environmentalist “earthly paradise” version of the concept is one that Western economic liberalism has been averse to contemporarily, it doesn’t mean that the West’s plutocrats will not soon get a liking to it, whether as an honest venture or a merely useful pretense. China, for instance, has already embraced facets of it.

 

II. The painting as a depiction of middle class, democratic struggles within big business-driven gentrification, acting as the second piece in the artist’s Positively Ugly series
    1.) Like The New Middle Class…, the painting depicts a section of the city that continues to sport its people’s graffiti beside emerging advertising graffiti or imagery.
    2.) According to the painter, the brown building on the left represents a product of a smaller scale of gentrification, echoing supposedly the aesthetic taste of larger-scale big-business projects. The green building on the right, meanwhile, represents an older structure that is still accommodating people’s graffiti and demonstrating certain freedoms. In other words, the painting side to the right of the viewer appears to be the one emulating a populist sort of art-loving lifestyle, while the one to the left is demonstrating an espousal of a more conservative taste.
    3.) However, inclusive of the buildings in the background the painting as a whole seems to side with the left-wing populism of the foreground green building, in seeming to say that a 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/gold and pink buildings behind) who can choose to ignore whatever sort of aesthetic fascism there is, like that aesthetic fascism peddled by the foregrounding conservative brown and black buildings to the left of the viewer (the painting's lower to middle right).
    4.) Corollary to no. 3, the painting’s having an uncomfortable sort of harmony (similar to the one in The New Middle Class…) carries the very point of de Veyra’s series, concerning an ideal, middle class-deriving gentrification development: the artist wants to avoid creating in his depiction what might appear as an intentionally unified or controlled color harmony often associated with big corporation-led gentrifications. After The New Middle Class…, de Veyra demonstrates in Earthly Paradise anew the possibility of a gentrification process proceeding without the “aesthetic fascism” of one single large corporation or influential aesthete, a gentrification that can maintain a semblance of aesthetic democracy, among all the classes in this case. He also continues here his point that should this undisturbed democratic aesthetic produce a neighborhood with colors ugly to certain tastes, it can tout itself as the positively ugly aesthetics of democracy, with emphasis on positively, which may push to change minds simply from a position of lively pride.
    5.) In fact, within anti-democratic aesthetics where some free color combinations may be tagged as ugly or tacky, the purported ugliness can be presented as an aesthetic rebellion that might extol the “ugliness” as actually prettier than any of the homogeneous brown or grey condominium building-fronts that have been inspired by the aesthetics of a uniformity-hungry corporate or government taste. The artist has called this latter pro-uniformity aesthetic “a seed of a much-larger tree of aesthetic fascism that could grow a cultural forest of beliefs empowering plutocratic diktats like an invasive species.”
    6.) There are other details symbolic of both the negative and the positive in de Veyra’s overwhelmingly gentrified cityscape. While in The New Middle Class… de Veyra painted a Takashi Murakami lookalike, here he painted what could pass for an image of Andy Warhol, to continue his paean to Pop art’s swaying between saluting progress and presenting progress' ironies. And since in The New Middle Class… de Veyra painted a Dexter Holland lookalike, he then painted here a generic singing face still referencing punk culture, punk being that movement that initially attacked classism but soon allowed itself to be conscripted by high fashion. One might actually ask if the singing punk image in the painting could have been derived from a photo of Johnny Rotten. The artist would most likely welcome that visual reading, considering the fact that a Johnny Rotten making an appearance in his painting could stand for democracy’s fragility, a fragility due to punks’ strong sympathies for the working class that nevertheless became vulnerable at one point or another to neoliberal and right-wing populist demagogueries that have purported to be on the side of democratic and working-class demands.
    7.) Other negative-to-positive features in this genre painting-cum-cityscape qua a reiteration of the message of The New Middle Class… include the following: while the absent view of the sky negatively underlines anew the concept of city economics and environments as a prison (wage slavery, light pollution, architectural alienation, etc.), a positive reading would focus the eyes on the democratizing culture ongoing below that sky and amidst all the architecture; while a fire hydrant negatively pokes again the self-awareness of materialism and wealth, positively the image posits a sense of community or mutual aid with the simple presence of this access to a public resource; while faces approximating certain people (from punk culture and Pop art) and people from diverse races are displayed on the walls almost in emulation of neocolonialism, the painting’s pro-democracy, anti-plutocracy message in itself is cosmopolitan, democratic globalist, and anti-nationalist in the democratic and Krugmanian free-trade sense; finally, while another soap brand’s logo, of Dove soap (another favorite soap brand of the artist), is here as a plastic stand-in for a real dove and as an advertising world’s panoramic imposition, the dove is also a symbol of peace and civil dialogue (the logo is on a blimp, which aircraft also has connections with the history of democracy’s defense).

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III. How the painting as 1) a comment on an “earthly paradise” concept existing in cities and as 2) a depiction of middle class, democratic struggle within big business-driven gentrifications . . . combines those two seemingly disconnected, even perhaps philosophically conflicting, directions
    The “paradise on earth” idea may indeed be vulnerable to autocratic parties and their disinformation machines. The hope lies in the fact that, in the end, the "earthly paradise" concept, both the environmentalist and religious ones, and democracy share a utopian urge to achieve 1) human freedom and happiness, 2) equality in people’s access to the commons, and 3) social renewal. Both also dismiss the idea of happiness as possible only in the afterlife, thus in effect churn out political movements that aim at creating an ideal society with the emotion of basking in responsible human self-governance.