Paradise

This series is my own visual interpretation of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I started exploring this Biblical theme sometime in the late 90s, after an exhibition with the Department of Anthropology of the University of San Carlos on the theme of gender and sexuality. My contribution in that exhibit was a post-coital scene of male and female lovers lying down next to each other with their sexual organs emphasized albeit not in an erotic way but rendered rather dispassionately through abstraction. 

 

I was then influenced by Joan Miro’s whimsical depiction of women in flat and brightly-colored biomorphic forms as well as Pablo Picasso’s similarly surreal and playful abstraction of the female anatomy throughout his work, but particularly during his transition to a more synthetic cubist style. I first wanted to explore the connections between human sexuality and nature. This resulted in abstract work focused on fertility and the lunar cycles. 

 

In this early exploration, I aimed for the same visual wit that characterized the work of both Miro and Picasso. The goal was to avoid as much visual cliches as possible, aiming to break down the human figure into its barest elements and yet in a new configuration or schema. This pursuit of original form led me to the drawings of little children (that of my own child, particularly), where objects are reduced into icons that are always different or unique. At the same time, like any good icon, the austere image should speak for itself or even help tell a story. What it lacks for detail it makes up with wit. 

 

Wit is interesting because it is itself minimalist. It is pure idea that needs no explanation. It’s either you get it or you don’t. Another paradox of wit is that while it is always fresh, it actually relies on a cliché, some visual peg, for example, that we are already familiar with. It cannot be totally mysterious or it would lose its expressive power. It is clever but it is also most honest: it bares itself to us as simple agile thought.

 

Which brings me to my Paradise series. While the title suggests a grand eternal narrative, I was actually only using it as an occasion for what I hope would be playful and clever abstraction. It is this sheer aesthetic delight that inspires me to do this series, not any desire to push an explicit statement or diatribe. In a way, it is like jazz, where the art lies not so much in the lyrics (which can be shallow or totally meaningless) but in the improvisation. 

 

Of course, it is also true that nothing is completely neutral or value-free. I leave it to the viewer to make for anything with what they see in my work. However, if there is any implicit meaning in my work, I’d like to point out that while it’s all about simple enjoyment of form, it can also be my own version of Immortal Beloved’s “Ode to Joy”, which is really a homage to nature. Nothing as grand in my case, however. It is more of a haiku than an epic poem. 

 

It is this “splendor of the simple”, these moments of unbearable lightness that I want to call attention to in the creative process. Art itself is such a joyful experience even if the artist aims for the darkest and most somber themes. And most of my paintings are of such “unpleasant” themes. So, this work aims to take a break from that usual dark palette and simply focuses on the sheer joy of figuring out form, beautiful image that, as one author once describes wit, brings “a smile in the mind”.