Soon to be seen at Taumbayan Bar-Bistro are a baker's dozen of paintings. Following is my statement on the show"Bling Blings & Lucky Me." Exhibition runs from April 9 to May 8. Regular Taumbayan hours are from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. The place is at 40 T. Gener and K-1 streets, Kamuning, Quezon City.
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“Bling Blings & Lucky Me”
Using her preferred medium of acrylic on canvas or paper canvas, Babeth Lolarga explores in her third solo exhibition of paintings the subject of the Pinoy’s obsession with brand names and accessorizing. She contrasts this against the majority’s diet of rice and fish and, in the absence of the first two items, instant noodles.
Mixing colors to approach oil’s qualities of opacity and luminescence, she lays on her statements thick and fast—thick because acrylic can have a texture that is tempting to touch and fast because it is a quick-dry medium suitable to a temperament that demands immediate results at the end of each working day.
The manipulated lack of a clear figure-ground relationship and the use of rudimentary, child-like colors project the subject’s image into a shrill visual scream.
The scream grows louder as she moves from her canvasette to two large-scale works.
In “Chief to Chief,” her last, long drawn-out scream in this show, she uses her life partner’s photographic image taken beside a figure of an Indian chief. In Baguio, he heads a newspaper’s Northern Luzon bureau, a role that is relevant.
The seemingly irrelevant red Indian leader has bearing in the woodcarving village of Asin, Benguet, which is also in his area of responsibility. There the carvers produce images of Indian chiefs mainly for export to craft stores in the United States located near Indian reservations. Said carvings are passed off as products of indigenous Americans. And so it goes for kangaroos passed off as made by Maoris in Australia, lions in Africa, laughing Buddhas in Taiwan, etc.
Although the painter’s choice of subjects may be a feeble, almost lonesome way of shaking a fist at the world, “Bling Blings & Lucky Me” has given her another way of improvisational ranting and emotional release.
April 2010
Quezon City
Photo shows "Chief to Chief," an acrylic painting on canvas board measuring 4 feet x 4 feet, a collaborative work of Babeth Lolarga and Chino Severo Chow, 2010. Photo by LIWA ARAOS
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