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People power’s currency


The first thing that strikes you when you enter the Looking For Juan (L4J) art space (Serendra, Taguig City) for the Mga Kuwentong EDSA exhibit is how familiar the images on both the small and large canvasses are, with faces and figures both real and abstract that speak of a time we might be too young to remember. But the icons / slogans / colors continue to have currency. Two artists are part of this exhibit, from different generations, both working with the EDSA Revolution of 1986 as premise. The works here are so obviously different, the similarities are just startling. Hope as well as pride and jubilation were rightfully in the art of Alfredo Liongoren, a NAMFREL volunteer during EDSA ‘86, with experiences that he spoke of animatedly as if it happened yesterday, telling stories of Virgin Marys being taken down from altars to be put in the hands of people on the streets, and of these people with no leader, ready to be told where to go, and build barricades where needed. It was after EDSA in 1986 that Liongoren began a series of abstract works inspired by his experience of those four days as citizen of nation, one that in the eyes of Liongoren was symbolic of two things: flowers and barbed wire. This might seem clichéd of course given both symbols’ presence during the revolution. Yet in Liongoren’s hands, it can only be an interesting look into the mind of an artist who lived to tell this tale, one that we are always hard put to find meaning in.

Alfredo Liongoren's "EDSA Noon" is now a faded yellow.
Liongoren’s retitled work “EDSA Noon" was originally painted in 1986, now with a yellow made dull by age, a stark backdrop to the heavy lines of rust, formed into what look like barbed wire but also: a TV antenna on the one hand, a structured fence on the other, an amount of freedom to pass through regardless. Half the canvas is filled with these heavy dark strokes, not so much scary as it is seems to be a reminder of freedom, of reframing these lines and making them ours. In “Untitled" painted in 1988, Liongoren stays with this imagery, though with a clearer if not different sense of what EDSA ‘86 was about. Now without a tinge of yellow, just some bright red and white against a dark dark blue, Liongoren’s heavy strokes of stylized barbed wire and fences seem less and less about freedom, as it is a matter of fact, of continued upheaval. The white stylized flowers to one side of it allow for whimsy, if not the possibility of quiet to take over the canvas as space, as dark space.
Alfredo Liongoren's "Untitled 1" is EDSA 1986 imagined in 1988.
This darkness is the first thing, meanwhile, that the art by Daniel Aligaen seems to be made of: three works are small enough to fit on one wall of the L4J art space, which actually reveal a set of faces looking out from canvases. Yet there is a touch of self-reflexivity here, almost a self-deprecatory look coming from someone like Aligaen who’s all of 25 years old, an unborn baby in his mother’s belly during EDSA 86. He interviewed his mother and asked questions, as he did ask his peers -- the ones who were kids post-1986 -- about EDSA, the conclusion for which are these works. And it is a conclusion that’s expected, but one that we rarely see. Because here Aligaen looks upon EDSA 1986 and sees himself as both its victim and hero, sees himself as both its possibility and logical conclusion. In “The Filipino is Worth Dying For?" the face of Jesus Christ is shown us up close, with sad sad eyes that look out to the world instead of up front at the spectator. In dirtied white and black, with heavy strokes and an orange hue that moved from pale to bright, this work almost invokes a discomfort, if not the gut reaction to say yes, yes I am worth dying for! Except that a layer of drawings in white ink above the primary image seems to create a sense of movement that’s both frantic and endless, if not the same for a majority. And then it becomes true that the sadness in these eyes is ours as well.
Confusion and possibility in Daniel Aligaen's "Teka Ano Bang Pinaglalaban Natin".
In “Teka Ano Bang Pinaglalaban Natin" Aligaen’s canvass is filled not just with what look like random faces of Filipinos, but the layer of ink drawings that seem to speak of both flight and whimsy, structure and dreaming still. The upper part of the canvas is a rendering of a floral pattern, the kind we usually see embroidered on cloth. Some of the people’s heads are filled with clumps of tiny pyramid-like shapes in various stages of seeming flight. What looks like a map possibly of space, maybe of nation, is on top of another head. An astronaut walks the lower part of the canvas. All these ink drawings are rendered part of the grid that cuts across the whole canvas, almost as if to highlight structure and finiteness in the midst of all this possibility of change. The only other word above this grid layer is that one word that highlights the lack of direction, the lack of dreaming here, even when plenty is in our heads. The same kind of grid is used in “Huy Gumising Ka Na," a personal favorite because of its ability to connote both life and death, creating an end in itself even as it highlights possibility still. The face here looks up, with blank eyes that look almost dead. Unlike in the other two works, here Aligaen’s layer of ink drawings is mostly in red instead of white, allowing this strange dynamic of both violence and movement, a reminder of how blood is the color of life, how change and revolt is necessarily not as peaceful as we imagine.
Daniel Aligaen's "Huy Gumising Ka Na" is both life and death, movement and lifeblood.
Or were able to experience in EDSA 1986. Aligaen’s take on those four days is actually a brave look at the kinds of things we have since come to believe about such recent history, and the people that matter. Here are nameless images, even the one of Jesus Christ melds seamlessly with the notion(s) of hero that we’ve dealt with since then, and here even the nameless are questioned / reassessed / concretized, even as it is also us, really. Especially because it’s also us. And it is this that is ultimately important about Mga Kuwentong EDSA. It’s that we are allowed to look at the art and artistry of two artists distanced by years, both reckoning with what we’ve come to know as people power, with all its slogans and icons. More importantly, we are forced into involvement, into a sense at the very least of what it is that EDSA 1986 requires of us all, even when we were too young to know, or were yet unborn. Because if Aligaen can be self-reflexive about it, and if Liongoren can speak of it now with so much hope still, then we must know that we can be both. The title card for “Huy Gumising Ka Na" says facetiously: “oil, acrylic, ink and awesomeness on canvas." That might be said of this whole exhibit as well. - GMA News Mga Kuwentong EDSA is at Looking for Juan (L4J) Artspace at the 2nd floor of Serendra, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig.
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