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 (the second and third being Earthly Paradise and The Imminent Rosy Gentrification..., with the fourth being Constant grounding,...).

    Combining elements of graffiti art, Pop art, genre painting, cityscape painting, Courbet realism, fantasy art (in terms of its 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 (an invasion that’s definitely real and ongoing), also demonstrated in the painting is what the painter called a neighborhood’s “positively ugly democracy,” which presents more of a utopian vision or a glorification of a different kind of gentrification. In short, this is not a merely realist depiction of a gentrification process going on somewhere. De Veyra’s utopian presentation avoids depicting the usual corporate-led or mogul-led clean design of real gentrifications to be able to tout in his idealized gentrification picture attitudes of individualism, diversity, multiculturalism, and openness, even while the painting may be said to also not be against the idea of upscaling. In de Veyra’s ideal gentrification form, the motor is coming from society’s middle or even bottom instead of 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 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 fully understand.

    Aside from the incursion of advertising graffiti, other imageries presented in this genre painting-cum-cityscape as realities that the neighborhood has to battle or overcome include the following: an absent view of the sky echoes the concept of city economics as a kind of prison (wage slavery, etc.); a surrealistically-large fire hydrant pokes at people’s over-materialism; two faces approximating certain famous people acknowledges the existence of punk culture and Pop art respectively as expressions of resistance and ironies; and a soap brand’s package symbolizes, according to the artist, “big business’ over-hype of artificial cleaning denying the natural functions of a geography’s democratic ‘biome’.”

 

AS per the title, the neighborhood being depicted in the painting, which is a fictional neighborhood, is referred to as one that used to be a “spray-painted little section of the city.” So, true, the painting is depicting a case of a developing 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 demand for gentrified communities is as much a participant in gentrification, if not the primary participant, 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.

    De Veyra appropriates 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, as well as to investments coming from globalization partners establishing bases in Philippine urban areas, and, finally, new middle- to upper-class Korean, Japanese and Chinese migrations to the Philippines playing a big part in the gentrification of many neighborhoods.

    De Veyra also refers to the old neighborhood in his painting as “our SoHo” to then reference SoHo, Manhattan, as per a research by American housing policy professor Phillip Clay. Clay had propounded, much like David Ley, that artists played a role, too, 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. But if 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, 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.

​    Why SoHo? 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. 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, where one could go to artists’ cafes, little galleries, little bookstores, coffeehouses, and so on. This attracted many from the wealthy class who wanted a part in 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 is talking about a neighborhood that used to be graffiti-rich, his SoHo, but is now slowly being rehashed to contain another sort of graffiti: advertising graffiti. Rehashed to become their SoHo. But, again, what is in his painting is of course fiction, as what could be seen in the picture 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 everything 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 de Veyra’s painting.

    Again, de Veyra’s painting is trying to depict the appearance of an ideal form of gentrification, implying the presence of an old-SoHo-loving kind of individual or collective gentrifier, wealthy but art-loving, or one with a populist sort of aesthetic taste. Such a gentrifier would definitely want to retain some of the elements of the old neighborhood, even if they somehow end up retaining only a fraction of it. So, the painting’s 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.

    But de Veyra is not trying to propose the impossible or the improbable here. 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 here, in the painting, has, supposedly, already undergone some change.

    What we see in the painting is of course 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 since, as mentioned, this is not a realist portrayal of a Philippine urban neighborhood’s gentrification, indeed this can be nothing else, then, but a cityscape that has been contrived by the artist to dramatize another sort of gentrifying transition. But what sort of transition? 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 not meant to photograph a certain reality but aims to propose another reality, the question should be whether that proposed reality is at all possible. And the artist has answered that it is. Because if indeed gentrification is also coming from the demands of the middle and the bottom middle and not merely from the propositions of investors and tastemakers at the top, then a neighborhood’s gentrification can also be instigated by this 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 a more updated gentrified 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, since this painting is about a middle-class-deriving gentrification process under any of those preceding situations, no one person or corporate family is 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.

 

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 simply by the democratic initiative of small retailers?

    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 the desire to update homes and the entire gentrification spirit.

    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.

    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 sensibility, e.g. Blade Runner. However, de Veyra did paint his hydrant in the unrealistic manner, forming an oversized one. It’s a contrivance to symbolize large properties’ demand for bigger property-protection facilities or infrastructures as well as an elliptical comment, somehow, on gentrified neighborhoods’ larger water consumption. But a hydrant that big might be more appropriate for big business-induced gentrified neighborhoods. Not this one. That’s why it just looks funny here.