Sharing my ideas and learnings from the MFAD program, along with experiences and art pursuits.
December 29-31, 2020
The year 2020 had been a bitter stew of lockdowns, market crash, political fiasco, and disasters. For artists, these could mean added challenge in getting through their audiences or as in the case of these two, an outpouring of new material and inspirations. This year brought out a unique collaboration between artists Louie Cordero and Mariano Ching. The Bat Soup Painters is their year-end exhibit held at MO_Space Gallery, from December 5 to 31. The exhibit title is a nod to the circumstances of the year, starting from the Taal eruption, political unrest and killings, and finally the Covid-19 threat believed to be from wild bats hunted for soup. The whole scenario seemed like a stew of twisted zombie-like figures; as Cordero tells in an interview with Juxtapoz, “we basically painted our situation this year.”
The artists first met as students in UP Diliman and though venturing into their own separate careers, they grew influenced by the same taste and inspiration, from comics, cartoons, kitsch, to underground/alternative music. Cordero’s aesthetics borders between kitschy-pinoy and surreal, more recently featuring alien-like organisms in varicolored paintings or freestanding sculptural works often taking inspiration from pop culture (My We from 2011, www.singaporebiennale.org). Ching is known more recently for his psychedelic-colored scenes, cartoon images, and sculptural wall-installations, a notable development from his heavy-themed 2009 exhibit, Apocalypse. The connection, circumstances, and development between their artistry led to this collaborative work; where a middle ground, quite literally, is a parking lot in Laguna to exchange half-done paintings; and their space for mutuality, the square canvas, for both to add from their own stock of images.
All ten artworks are of acrylic, on uniform 36” by 36” unframed box canvases. Each of which depicts either a surreal scene or story, like in Sniffing for the Supremacy of Pure Artistic Feeling and Long Term dusk Glimpses, or out-of-this-world organisms, or as Estiler describes it, twisted biomorphic figures, like in Chariots of the Fog and Saṃsāra Phantasma. The paintings are spread far apart over a rectangular white room, spotlights on each, and no titles on all. The arrangement of the paintings are of the artist’s discretion according to MO_Spaces.
Going further into the artworks, a recurring figure is their depiction of a morphed human with contorted bodies in humorous proportion, wrinkles that appear like textures, and exaggerated facial features in a myriad of psychedelic colors. The scenes are often completed with objects ranging from recognizable shoes to cosmic structures like varicolored and weirdly-shaped houses (In Dead Moon) or volcanoes (in Cosmic Shores); and animals that also exhibit the same exaggeration, like the snake (in It’s Just a Burning Memory) with a boxy body or the garish cat (in Odd Heavenly Beings) - all in a surrealist and cartoonish stylization. The backgrounds often steer clear of heavy texture, opting for solid pastel colors with slight gradient. Another feature I noticed is the way the edges are unretouched with drippings from objects and seemingly detached from the background; which is noticeably added much later compared to the images in foreground. Cordero and Ching delivers on the oddities of the bat soup, yet instead of round bowls with floating carcasses, we see it in these square canvases featuring more than bats, surreal figures direct from the painter's collaborative connection in imagination.
For ten paintings with no titles to hold a 90-square-meter white room is perhaps an invitation for viewers to look closer into the paintings visually, its composition, colors, and objects in it. Not clouded by any titles which viewers (like me) tend to interpret based on the figures depicted, viewers are led to imagine and make sense of the creation as it is; or simply be amused or be captivated, then be curious about the title and what it's all about. That is exactly what happened to me when I glanced upon what turns out to be Cosmic Shores and realized it has something to do with the Taal explosion. I also look at the untouched edges along with the uniformity of the square canvases and I see the same invitation to focus on the whimsical composition in front of you, regardless of size or quality or even title.
The oneness of composition and differences of artists are revealed in distinct objects in the works of the bat soup painters. Indeed, collaborations in painting are very elusive pursuits. While some paintings may have very slight distinctions that it may seem one hand painted it, others have notable detached stylization or strokes; while some have the same elements in separate artworks, yet they are of different styles - shows breaks of inconsistency. For instance, in Dead Moon Happy Apple and Savage Victory we see the same coconut tree painted two distinct ways. Same with the way foliage is drawn on the later, which is reminiscent of Chings’ vine work in Under the Western Sky (Clint Eastwood in Hat On, Bottoms Off Exhibit, 2011), compared to how leaves are vividly shaped and colored in It’s Just a Burning Memory and Saṃsāra Phantasma. The disparity does show the limit of the collaboration, as far as the effort to present all works in oneness is in question. Nonetheless, these distinctions become markers of the lockdown limitations, and that the painters are two connected artists bonded by mutual respect for each other's work.
In getting to know Cordero and Ching’s body of work, the sorts of expectation are the sculptural installations. The bare space in the middle and the banal white walls, though emphasizing the colorful paintings, are asking for something known of the artists. This begs me to ask if indeed the square canvases are artistic middle grounds or compromise out of convenience, along with refraining from their distinct sculptural creations, to push an idea of successful homogenized collaboration. Perhaps the exhibition left me wanting more from them; more collaboration beyond the square canvases. Hoping the organisms painted could jump out and be sculptural installations, I am left craving for another round of their bat soup. - jrssj