DE Veyra’s 2018 painting lengthily titled The New Middle Class and the Remaking of Our SoHo, Our Spray-Painted Little Section of the City started his series about gentrification, currently made up of four paintings (see the next three paintings in the "Positively Ugly" series in the recent-works index page).
    Combining elements of graffiti art, Pop art, genre painting, cityscape painting, Courbet realism, fantasy art (in terms of an overall unrealism), and surrealist automatist abstraction as well as Arte Povera (in terms of its color choices, scheme/composition and taste), the painting depicts, as its title suggests, a fictional formerly-graffiti-rich neighborhood undergoing gentrification, where all the original graffiti is in the process of being replaced by advertising graffiti. However, in the painting, de Veyra (as he does in the other paintings in the series) presents his fictional gentrifying neighborhood as a fantasy—for instance, despite the supposed advertising graffiti invasion depicted here (which is an invasion definitely real and ongoing in the world), the painting could also be viewed as depicting what the painter calls a neighborhood’s “positively ugly democracy,” which presents a utopian or ideal vision concerning gentrification, glorifying, that is, a different (for being more of a middle-class) kind of gentrification. In painting this fantasy cityscape, de Veyra is able to give us a realist depiction of a gentrification process going on somewhere, the usual critical or negative treatment of such an occurrence, and then, from another point of view, a demonstration of an alternative ideal for such a process, a more positive treatment of the gentrification process occurring in this picture.
    How does de Veyra achieve the latter? For his utopian presentation of an ideal, he simply avoids depicting the usual corporate-led or mogul-led clean design of real gentrifications to be able to tout in his picture a middle class-driven gentrification process accompanied by symbols of individualism, diversity, multiculturalism, and openness, even while the painting may be said to not be against the idea of upscaling as a matter of course. Again, in this, de Veyra’s ideal gentrification form, the motor is coming from society’s middle and even cultural bottom, not from its top.
    As de Veyra is aware of the primary market of gallery-based paintings today, this can only imply the artist’s positive attitude toward the potential of hipster culture and his hopefulness toward the approachability of wealthy social liberals, the market or audience he is consciously targeting or addressing. In essence, the painting, viewed from the positive angle, is a statement against the aesthetic fascism of big business gentrifications and similar concepts of progress, favoring a middle-class-based gentrification development, a statement that social liberals might fully understand.
    But let’s go back to the negative images of gentrification that may be present here. Aside from the incursion of advertising graffiti depicted here, other expressive imageries presented in de Veyra’s genre painting-cum-cityscape as realities that the neighborhood has to either battle or have include the following: an absent view of the sky, echoing the concept of city economics and environment as a kind of prison (wage slavery, limited access to natural light, etc.); a surrealistically-large fire hydrant, here poking fun at people’s over-materialism; two faces approximating the faces of two famous people from punk culture and Pop art, acknowledging punk culture and Pop art’s respective existence as expressions of resistance and ironies; and a soap brand’s package, symbolizing, according to the artist, “big business’ over-hype of artificial cleaning denying the natural functions of a geography’s democratic ‘biome’.”

THE neighborhood being realized by the painting, which is a fictional neighborhood, is referred to by the work’s title as one that used to be a “spray-painted little section of the city.” So, true, the painting is portraying a case of urban renewal. But it also references a new middle class that has infiltrated this neighborhood and is spurring the gentrification process here.
    The painting’s title is actually a play on the title of a book by David Ley, a Canadian geographer known for his contributions to the field of social, cultural, and urban geography, titled The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. De Veyra’s aim was not to represent the book, but to kowtow to Ley’s approaching the problem of gentrification from the demand angle instead of merely from the supply angle, because to Ley, the aesthetic demand for gentrified communities is as much a motor of gentrification, if not the primary motivator, as the supply of gentrified neighborhoods. Or he (Ley) is saying that gentrification is happening because there’s a market for it, a market that is not only allowing it but in fact has desired for all of it to happen. Therefore, a solution to the gentrification problem can also be hatched from the bottom of this demand instead of from the supplying or governing top. And de Veyra presents in this very same negative picture his positive view-cum-solution.
    But let’s go on. De Veyra appropriated Ley’s mention of “the new middle class” to allude to the Philippine reality of OFW new money contributing to the demand for gentrified neighborhoods, and to investments coming from globalization partners establishing bases in Philippine urban areas, e.g., the new middle- to upper-class Korean, Japanese and Chinese migrants to Philippine society now playing a big part in the gentrification of many neighborhoods in the country.
    In his title, de Veyra also refers to the old neighborhood in his painting as “our SoHo” to then reference SoHo, Manhattan, as per research by American housing policy professor Phillip Clay. Clay had propounded, much like David Ley, that artists play a role in the gentrification of several inner cities in the United States and Canada. By artists, one should not limit the word to point to painters and sculptors solely, but also to new film or video makers, still-struggling practitioners in architectural design, restaurant chefs, fashion designers, interior designers, illustrators, industrial designers, stage designers, musicians, even writers. Maybe it should even include art patrons. Now, regarding artists, we might insert here the fact that there are those artists (or art fans) who would want any old SoHo to remain as it is, artists and art fans who might refer to that kind of SoHo in their hearts as “our SoHo,” as there would also be that other aesthetic that would welcome or desire a more upscale, more expensive SoHo, a SoHo that the former group of artists would then refer to as “their SoHo.” Here in this Clay-propounded theory itself is already the issue concerning the conflict between a more democratic, perhaps even socialist, aesthetics and the modernist aesthetics of the upwardly-mobile. Could that conflict or battle be subtly seen in de Veyra’s painting as well?
​    And why SoHo? Well, the case of SoHo in Manhattan, New York City, in the United States, is actually quite a known case, one that American sociology professor Sharon Zukin described very well in her study. As per Zukin, SoHo, Manhattan, used to be an artists’ haven because of the neighborhood’s then-low rental rates. It became an artists’ scene, then, where one could go to artists’ cafes, little galleries, little bookstores, coffeehouses, and so on. This attracted many from the wealthy class who wanted to be a part of the scene, and these members of the moneyed class started getting units for themselves in the neighborhood and started the gradual hiking of rental costs in SoHo. All finally reached the point where the aforementioned artists and musicians and authors living in the area could hardly afford to stay there any longer. The artists started to move out, and what remained were the more upscale art of the fashion and culinary industry, etc., as well as the new owners of the newly gentrified neighborhood. The artists, at least the not-so-well-off-yet ones, went somewhere else.
    De Veyra’s painting references a neighborhood that used to be graffiti-rich, his SoHo, that is now slowly being rehashed to contain another sort of graffiti: advertising graffiti; it is being rehashed to become their SoHo. But, again, what is in his painting is fiction, as what could be seen in the composition is not something that could be happening in a particular urban reality in the country, as far as we know, for, in the usual real world, the gentrifying capitalist would simply paint over all existing graffiti in a neighborhood’s walls and replace all of them with the commonplace modernist architectural aesthetics for apartment fronts that we’ve seen so much of in our metropolises. None of those gentrified neighborhoods, or neighborhoods in the process of being gentrified, would look like the one in this de Veyra painting, unless they were contrived to appear so, pretending to contain little house owners instead of a conglomerate.
    Thus, we could say that de Veyra is trying to purposely fail to depict a negative view of the ongoing gentrification in his painting while trying to depict the appearance of an ideal form of gentrification here, implying the presence of a collective gentrifier, wealthy but art-loving, all with a populist sort of aesthetic taste. Such a collective gentrifier would definitely want to retain some of the elements of the old neighborhood, wouldn’t they, even if they somehow end up retaining only a fraction of it. So, the painting’s final message, as against paintings or photographs that merely lament pictures of gentrification, is one that proposes a positive angle. One could say that the painting is also pointing to such concepts in gentrification and urban renewal as inclusionary zoning, etc.
    Now, sure, we did mention the fact that real gentrifications occurring in the world would not appear the way they do in de Veyra’s painting. However, please note that de Veyra’s “fantastic” cityscape is also not trying to propose the impossible or the improbable. In the often-asked question regarding why the colors in The New Middle Class… don’t seem to have a comfortable sort of harmony, or why it seems that the artist used too many colors, the rule being that a painting must use no more than three major colors, the artist has said that “when you go to a spray-painted section of any city, they usually wouldn’t have a unifying color harmony, none that is not accidental, anyway, unless the artists get together and come up with an agreement, which is unheard of, as far as I know.”
    But, of course, de Veyra is still talking about graffitists in their old neighborhood; the neighborhood in the painting has, supposedly, already undergone some change. In other words, what we see in the painting is no longer that old section of the city; it has already been transformed, has already been gentrified to a certain extent, or is already in that process of development or transformation. But though, as mentioned, this is not a realist portrayal of a Philippine urban neighborhood’s gentrification, indeed this can be read as a cityscape that has been contrived by the artist to dramatize another sort of gentrifying transition. But what sort of transition, an impossible one? Let’s go back to the question of realism and as to whether this kind of neighborhood is possible, or to be clearer, if the picture is truly not meant to photograph a certain reality but aims only to propose another reality—the question should be whether that proposed reality is at all possible. And the artist has answered that it is possible, if it hadn’t already happened somewhere. Because if indeed gentrification is also coming from the demands of the middle and the bottom middle (as per Ley) and not merely from the propositions of investors and tastemakers at the top, then a neighborhood’s gentrification can also be instigated by these same middle and bottom middle, either through the procedures of inclusionary zoning or simply through the investments of smaller money (new middle class money) other than the usual big business corporate funds. In short, to de Veyra, it is possible for a gentrification process to proceed without the involvement of a large corporation but simply through a neighborhood of individual building owners who might collectively decide, separately or together, to invest or reinvest in their own neighborhood, or in their own buildings, for whatever reason. After all, didn’t the same thing happen in Nakpil Street in Malate, Manila in the late 1990s, resulting in a neighborhood of new restaurants and bars, with the street suddenly becoming one of the new nightlife destinations of Metro Manila? To de Veyra, that is perhaps one ideal sort of gentrification, wherein you would have a dilapidated old-money neighborhood getting its rehash from a new generation of its inhabitants (or former inhabitants) toward an updated look. In that sort of situation, no one is displaced; the old owners of the buildings remain the owners, either by way of new middle class funding from within or through pooled funding or through help from a local government. In this sort of situation, no new owners come into the picture, although there might be new buy-in (but not buyout) investors.
    So, now, seeing this painting as about a middle-class-deriving gentrification process under any of those preceding situations, no one person or corporate family could be said to be deciding for everybody here, in this neighborhood; no one is curating for everybody what color their respective buildings should have.
    Now, would that small-scale kind of gentrification result in something ugly or loud or tacky? De Veyra couldn’t care less. To him, that ugliness, if it is to be tagged by someone as ugly, is prettier than a homogeneous grey condominium building-front proposition coming from the aesthetics of large corporations or single taste-imposing moguls.

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AND that’s precisely why de Veyra did the wall images in his painting the way he did them—it’s not entirely clear whether they’re still free graffiti or advertising graffiti; the only thing that’s clearly advertising graffiti there is that of an Irish Spring Sport box, which is a product that doesn’t even exist anymore. And even that is painted far from how the official ad campaign for the product went; Colgate-Palmolive’s marketing people might even protest at how their defunct soap is being presented here, as might the producers of that Polo Sport bag. Is it possible that in the painting these images are supposedly not being done by the dictates of big business’ advertising departments but by the democratic initiative of their small retailers, extending de Veyra’s argument for democracy?
    Let’s explore some of the other symbolic details that de Veyra included in his composition.
    In the painting there are two Sport brands. To de Veyra, they signify everyone’s desire to be forever young and healthy and upwardly mobile, which to him is synonymous with everyone’s desire to update their homes and the entire gentrification spirit present in everyone.
    As for the figures and faces that he painted that seem to combine features from different races, . . . a white man’s face looking like a young Dexter Holland and an Asian face looking like Takashi Murakami, . . . the artist wanted them to represent a neighborhood that could be in any cosmopolitan area in the world. So there is an ad box on one of the walls that advertises a show in Galleri Egelund in Denmark, beside which is a Five Below store window. Five Below doesn’t have a franchisee or brand licensee in the Philippines yet.
    Now, that combining tendency in the artist’s expression cannot be said to be in any way similar to the surrealist bent. If anything, it may have more in common with a futurist cosmopolitan sensibility, e.g. Blade Runner. However, de Veyra did paint his hydrant in the unrealistic manner, forming an oversized one. It’s a contrivance that appears to symbolize large properties’ demand for bigger property-protection facilities or infrastructures as well as state an elliptical comment, somehow, on gentrified neighborhoods’ larger water consumption, remembering a negative view of the gentrification occurring here. But a hydrant that big might also be an expression of community and sharing, or of the commons, and therefore a middle finger to the plutocratic roots of the gentrification that many of us know.