THIS small oil piece (titled I Placed a Jan Fabre Piece on Death at Our Show about Life) is dated 1990 but first appeared in public in de Veyra’s 2018 solo show.

    On this piece, the overwhelming presence is perhaps that flag of the erstwhile Soviet Union in the background. But then, upon reading the work’s title, the viewer notices that the defunct republic is not mentioned and is led to look for what this title is referring to as the Jan Fabre piece inside the picture. What is being referenced as the Jan Fabre piece here, of course, is that central drawing that is an imitation of the sort of Jan Fabre sculpture that evokes feelings about death, specifically the death of animals. In such a Fabre sculpture as represented here, the controversial Belgian artist would be gluing insect wing cases onto his figures’ surfaces, many from the jewel scarab, which material produced shiny Fabre sculptures. These shiny Fabre sculptures about death, or about the death of animals or insects, resembled to de Veyra the Egyptian mummy cases that were often found to be embellished with gold and/or jewels.

    But de Veyra’s title is talking about this central drawing, Fabre’s sculpture on death, as being placed in a show about life. So, there is here the top of that Constantin Brâncuși sculpture about “the essence of” flight, and then the right end of what looks like a Piet Mondrian painting. We might be familiar with the fact that Mondrians are purportedly about the basic structures of life and the spirit, therefore what could be Mondrian’s proto-DNA concepts.

    As for the Soviet flag, one would be led to ask whether that also belongs to the life section of the fictive show or is an accompaniment to the Fabre piece on death. Since it is behind the Jan Fabre piece, it might indeed be an accompaniment to it; but if that is so, that would only be according to one reading. Because, you see, Communism is purportedly about life, too. To communists, the utopia is about the liberation of the working class from their misery, delivering them to a bright and happy future of farming together in a utopian farm commune.

    And yet . . . history has demonstrated that the process of attaining Communism’s bright picture betrayed weaknesses in the Communist design. There was Stalinism, which grew from it, and the Soviets’ longstanding ethnic bias that sent people to the Gulag, and so on and so forth. According to 20th-century history, Communism’s life-affirming vision on paper became a vision of death in reality. Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and many other writers sympathetic to the Socialist spirit sent the world vivid pictures of how that frustrating process developed fatally in the USSR, in Maoist China, and in many other communist states past and present.

    Whatever prompted de Veyra to do this work? As a democratic socialist, was he expressing here an anti-Communist sentiment? But de Veyra said in an interview that he only wanted to do a painting about a show. That is, a picture depicting an art exhibition or a fragment of it. He said he was also conceptually thinking of having such a painting in a show, so that we’d have a show within a show, or artworks in a show within an artwork in a show.

    But instead of “pure” artworks in a show, he here painted in the middle of that painting about a show a country’s flag, and a USSR flag at that.

    De Veyra said that, at first, he wanted a hanging tapestry as his big image. But then he thought, “why not a stronger presence?” Indeed, what “art” presence could be stronger than a country’s flag? Then he thought, “oh, why not a Communist flag?” Haha! This led him to the painting’s present context, which positions the Communist utopia, or any utopia for that matter, as actually an artwork by itself, whether a good or bad one.

    De Veyra also said that he’d want anti-communists to own this; say, a Russian who might agree that the Soviet regime was a regime of death more than of life. Then again, he also said that he wouldn’t mind if a Communist buys this instead, for as long as it is one who would agree that there is much to be desired from the old versions of the Communist utopia or art, much room for improvement, that is, from which it might be possible for future communists to finally produce or attain that regime of life that their utopia envisioned, instead of the dystopia of death that their old product inevitably became.