LATE in the first quarter of 2023, Altro Mondo Arte Contemporanea gallery announced a forthcoming show at the Altro Mondo Gallery at The Picasso Boutique Serviced Residences. It was to be a show dedicated to the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, in commemoration of Altro Mondo Arte Contemporanea’s continued collaboration with The Picasso Boutique hotel, a hotel that had been using Picasso and Matisse aesthetics in its rooms’ furnishing and wall schemes. The show was to be titled The Rose Period, and Altro Mondo invited de Veyra to contribute a piece. The artist decided to submit the above acrylic painting, which he titled La Inminente Gentrificación Rosada de la Avenida Paloma (The Imminent Rosy Gentrification of Dove Avenue). The show was launched on 18 May 2023.
    While de Veyra chose Picasso as his jump-off point, he chose to appropriate images from Picasso’s Blue Period rather than from the artist’s Rose Period, connecting this imagery to the Rose Period show through the “rose” in the work’s title. De Veyra’s piece extended to three in 2023 his series of cityscape paintings ostensibly presenting an ideal form of gentrification, which was started by his painting titled The New Middle Class and the Remaking of Our SoHo, Our Spray-Painted Little Section of the City (shown at his first one-man show in 2019 in this same gallery) and followed by Earthly Paradise (shown at a group show of the same name in 2022 at Altro Mondo’s Creative Space on Chino Roces Avenue).
    De Veyra started La Inminente Gentrificación Rosada in April 2023 and finished it a month later. It is an acrylic-on-canvas horizontal painting measuring 38 inches by 51 inches. As mentioned, it appropriates images from Picasso’s socialist-leaning Blue Period as well as from his dove-themed works for a socialist party to represent in de Veyra’s composition a lamentable cityscape or dilapidated urban neighborhood (the sidewalk that should sport a hydrant, as in the series’ first two paintings, here only displays a hole).
    At first glance, the painting almost seems to criticize Picasso’s next period, his Pink Period, in associating that Picassoan turn’s rosy color with the plutocracy-pointing word “gentrification” in the painting title. It’s natural for this to be the initial reading, as the phrase “rosy gentrification” paired with the word “imminent” carries the mood of being ominous (pessimistic) towards an impending future, with the adjective “rosy” likely used by the artist to be satiric toward that oncoming change he was aiming to reference. This sad reading could also be bolstered by the fact that de Veyra did remain negative in 2023 toward the government of the triumphant Bongbong Marcos camp installed in June 2022.
    However, remember that de Veyra had been associating socialism of the Scandinavian kind (not communism) with democratic happiness; remembering that should lead us to conclude that perhaps de Veyra’s title is essentially adding a context to Picasso’s happy “pink” period to accommodate a kind of hopeful pinkoism, de Veyra’s kind of hopeful pinkoism. It must also be recalled that de Veyra campaigned online for the open government and participatory democracy platform of Leni Robredo’s pink-color-carrying presidential campaign in 2022, even putting up a small online group show subtly dedicated to that campaign (titled Let’s Pink Up the Pieces!); the post-defeat hopeful slogan among followers of that campaign had been “ang namulat, di na muling pipikit” (they who have been awakened to certain realities won’t sleep again).
    Furthermore, it should be recalled that de Veyra’s first two paintings in his series on gentrification are not mere critiques on gentrification but primarily efforts to present an ideal or alternative form of gentrification. As an extension, therefore, this third piece in the series might perhaps be read as equally positive in its tone, in implying a persistent idealism and prescriptive hopefulness to contrast with the mournful “blue” present depicted in the picture.
    Then again, despite the dove-image’s presence affirming the above two preceding paragraph’s positively hopeful reading of the painting, the large central image imitating Picasso’s Portrait of Suzanne Bloch and an image of a rooftop billboard advertising Paloma Picasso’s Minotaure soap and cologne brand both offer a reverberation of contradicting meanings. Is this picture actually pointing, then, to a future of conflict between right-wing and left-wing politics instead of a win by de Veyra’s desired pinkoism? In short, is the painting more a picture of worry, after all, than an optimistic one, therefore different from the series’ first two utopian pieces?
    Suzanne Bloch was supposed to be a Wagnerian singer, and, in spite of Bloch’s reality, Wagner was a man of many contradictions. Initially associated with the socialists and socialist anarchists of Dresden, Wagner later became known as a follower of Schopenhauer’s “philosophical pessimism” and an anti-Semite. In the 20th century, his music and anti-Semitism were appropriated by Adolf Hitler’s Nazism as an inspiration.
    Meanwhile, the presence of Paloma Picasso’s Minotaure brand could be a comment on Paloma’s relative apoliticism and merely glamour-surrounded fame, contrasting those with her father Pablo’s political engagements (even through a gargantuan success). Paloma also later married a DO, or practitioner of the continually controversial field of osteopathic medicine, the ostensibly pseudoscience part of which practice has recently been associated with current rightisms, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or is the Minotaur name up there to represent the Minotaur in the myth and in other variations of it as a symbol, as per one of its original significations, for a bull-warrior, rapist, and prisoner all in one? In Picasso’s Vollard Suite, the minotaur starts as a gentle albeit libertine lover, then is transformed into a rapist and woman-eater, then finally a miserable, blind, and impotent animal. In other words, is the brand here on the rooftop referring to society as a collective of minotaurs (or maharlikas) under a ruling neoliberal plutocracy of minor gods?
    Whatever is your preferred reading, this truly is a painting about an oncoming future, good (pink) or “good” (satiric “pink”), its future-looking mood hinted by the clouds in the rooftops’ horizon; this was the first time de Veyra allowed us a view of the sky in his tetralogy series.