Artists attack EDSA: Street art on a grand scale

Mid-morning on Saturday was an unusual time for traffic along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA). Metro Manila's major thoroughfare is usually uncongested at the time. But as commuters and motorists on the southbound lane of EDSA got to the San Lorenzo Village gate, the path ahead of them narrowed as traffic enforcers and security personnel blocked off two lanes of the highway, where a small crowd had gathered. And right there, in the center of the commotion, was a mural as tall as a two-storey house painted right on the sidewalk wall. But this was no ordinary street art.

Among the admiring crowd were no less than Vice President Jejomar Binay and Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) chairman Francis Tolentino, accompanied by a coterie of Filipino artists from around the world. It was street art on a grand scale —literally and figuratively. The mural itself was the creation of Jose Tence Ruiz, the social realist painter. His work, entitled “Ganap" (“Consummation"), is a harmonious interplay of tangent motifs: the ordered chaos of natural evolution, on the one hand, and the logical unfolding of mechanical progress, on the other. Ruiz painted a lush landscape of wild flowers, lobsters, squids and jellyfish emerging, fractal-like, from the whitewashed stone wall. And amidst this panorama of ‘fractalized’ flora and fauna, the artist chose to paint a computer keyboard's ‘ENTER’ key. Ruiz is just one of eleven artists commissioned for the Everyone Deserves Safe Air (EDSA) Project, a collaboration with the MMDA and paint manufacturer Boysen Philippines (Pacific Paints, Inc.). The EDSA Project artists proclaim their collective masterpiece as the first curated public art initiative in the country. The murals will also serve an environmental function. It is also the first urban renewal project to use an air-cleaning paint, which Boysen claims is able to eliminate nitrous oxide and nitrogen dioxide from the air it gets in contact with. Lead curator Marian Pastor Roces said, “The considerable size of the artworks will embody the hard science verifying that every square meter painted with KNOx-OUT eliminates the exhaust of 10 cars." Eight murals, each 1,000 square meters in size, will be painted along the length of EDSA — one of the most polluted roads in Asia, according to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources — on a variety of structures: walls, pylons, and other urban structures. Roces explained that the team “chose locations that have the highest commuter and pedestrian density, and the EDSA segments at key intersections that have staggering air pollution levels." In particular, the southern terminal of the commuter rail line on EDSA will be a challenging canvas. Roces said, “The artist working on this site will be tackling the rail terminal building as well as more than a dozen massive circular posts that serve as elevated railway pylons." — TJD/HS, GMA News