Baffling is the tiny art space that is 20 Square in SLab at Silverlens Gallery (Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati City). Sometimes it’s but an extension of the rest of the works in SLab; most other times that I’ve been there, it’s a measure of artists’ creativity in smaller works, something that I imagine is about discipline and control. And then at other times, I am surprised and want to live in 20 Square. Dex Fernandez’s \m/ made me want to do exactly that. I wanted to find a chair and sit in the middle of the small room and stare at the small sculptures attached to the walls. Of course a chair for one would’ve filled that tiny space. Images of a crowd in a small space is also what the idea of \m/ creates; \m/ is the symbol for that rock ‘n’ roll signal we do with our fingers (pinky and index fingers up, middle fingers kept down by thumb). It is also what you think of first when you enter that room and see what seems to be a version of a rock poster. Fernandez brings back memories of rock concerts (OPM and otherwise), and crowds, and drinking and noise. I almost wished they were playing some rock music inside the tiny room.
The 20 Square art space in SLab is easy to fill, literally and figuratively, with art on walls and spectator in the middle of it.
That poster is actually the one huge archival photo print in the room: a tattooed man is smiling broadly beside a life-sized statue of a standing mother and child. The mother is tattooed as well, the baby’s face reconfigured into what looks like origami, both wear the crowns that identify them as familiar religious icons. Both are being treated like rock stars. It is after all a poster that’s reminiscent of those old heavy-metal posters, when our elders were afraid of the anti-christ, and backmasking was believed to be the work of bands like Metallica. Of course now it all seems so silly, as does this poster that also reads: God Bless the Rockstars. Surrounding the posing man with a wide grin and the Mother and Child statue are images of the Jesus Christ, hands reaching out, calling on his believers. These photos come from this room as well, filled as the rest of the room is with nothing but gray walls with unobtrusive cartoon-like images that also appear as tattoos on the bodies of the stars of this show: six statues of Jesus Christ, about a foot each, exactly the kind you’d see in houses across this country. Except that these icons are wrapped in black cloth instead of the usual white, and fingernails and toenails all sport black nail polish, save for one which wears it white. All of them stand on a rock each painted uniformly with bright-colored swirls and squiggles against black. All of them are entitled “Hey Idol, how you doin’?"
The series of tattooed Jesus Christ icons is entitled "Hey Idol, how you doin'?" with this one seemingly happier with a bright paradise tattoo and nails painted white.
They seem to be doing quite well, thank you. While the sight of these icons in this room was unexpected, what was surprisingly calming was the familiarity of those tattoos on each icon’s upper body, different as these were from each other. Roses with strange cartoon-like images that hew closely to popular culture are in bright colors on one icon’s chest and arms; another’s tattoos are in pastel colors with a skull-like creature and the words “create destroy" in big letters. A growling leopard fills the chest of one icon, with a seemingly dark world as background, while one icon has a chest free of tattoos, but has arms with a snake each, tattooed as if coiled around the length of each arm, their heads meeting by the collar bone as if in battle. Standing alone against two individual walls were the more distinct icons, though only so upon closer inspection. The one with white nail polish seems brighter and happier, if only because of the version of paradise tattooed on its chest, where a dragon seems to happily exist alongside a brightly painted garden of flowers. Right before you leave the tiny room of 20 Square is the last icon, its chest filled with two huge black tattoos of smiling skulls and the words “You’re Welcome" on the icon’s collar. On the one hand the tattoos here obviously function as they should: to identify one from the other, to make one body different from the next. At the same time, what sinks in is a sense of a tattoo culture, one that we rarely think of but which, given these images, is one that actually exists given our sense of the stereotypical tattoo, the standard images. We know of those roses and skulls, of those strange creatures and animals as tattoos because we’ve seen them often enough. Of course the additional layer in Fernandez’s work is that of the bodies on which these tattoos exist. This barely resonates with me because of my non-practicing Catholic sense of blasphemy. Instead the images of the Christ icons as tattooed male bodies echo in the struggles they push forth, ones that aren’t just about religiosity. It’s obvious after all that Christ is being made human here, as it is a statement on our humanity vis a vis an impossible icon of kindness.
The familiar tattoos speak of a subculture with its own stereotypical images, its own identity, its own art.
But what’s here as well is the struggle of contemporary masculinity, where the tattoo is a mark of machismo, even as it also recreates the male body into object. There’s the struggle of the inked against the stereotype of the tattooed as ex-convict / outsider / sinner, at the same time that current times have created a fad out of getting a tattoo. There is the truth of tattoo art as valid, rarely acknowledged art form, regardless of where it’s done and who does it, from the tattoo parlors in malls to the jail cells in Bilibid. At the same time it is difficult to forget the kind of contradiction that’s here, and how this contradiction seems to be normalized and made appropriate, given these statues of Christ, with arms reaching out, eyes equally sad and bright, body ready for the taking. That the tattoos on these bodies are tacky images in color combinations that we wouldn’t care for just makes more sense here. After all, this icon is as much literal idol as it is figuratively such. He is idol as a rockstar necessarily is, the latter as unique as the tattoos on his body, as real as he is made to be by a mass culture, an audience, a fan base, that demands his existence. In Dex Fernandez’s hands, Jesus Christ and Pepe Smith are the same. In that sense,
pareho silang rakenrol.
– HS, GMA News 
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