July 9, 2008
FILIPINO BELIEF SYSTEMS DELINEATED (Manila Bulletin-Lifestyle E1:July 7,2008)
Paul Blanco Zafaralla
Significance in the visual arts goes beyond the level of the visual. Since the visual artist is generally perceived as a thinking and feeling individual, his work necessarily becomes an embodiment of the workings of the artist’s eye, mind, heart, and hand, ideally in this order. Anything less emasculates the resultant work, and therefore cannot be considered as a reliable document of the artist’s reactions to things inside and outside himself.
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Jonahmar Salvosa with his latest work
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A tall order, this. But the imperatives of today’s cultural situation necessitate a retooling of the artist’s eye, mind, heart, and hand.
Technological hardware is not only upon us now. It has already threatened the very identity of most of our material cultures, traditions–both filial and social–in short, our belief systems. Result: a re-valuation of most things we used to hold in theo-cultural awe.
This reality obviously took hold of the eye, mind, heart, and hand of Jonahmar Aguilar Salvosa, whose 23rd one-man show called “Musings” at the Art Asia Gallery, SM Mandaluyong City, ends today, July 7.
Diwatas and babaylans
Our diwatas and babaylans, parts of our belief systems (both conceptual and concrete), are fast losing their significance in our national consciousness due to all kinds of technological crap impacting changes in our beliefs. Few and far between are the visual artists who bother to focus their attention on such subjects, resulting in a gradual alienation of major factors in Philippine culture in the large.
In Bighani II, the force of the past is lucid and spontaneous manifested by the long, flowing hair of the diwata, paralleled by her long, transparent raiment. The light–dark alternation serves as a pictorial factor for the inner cultural message of verve and calculated tension. The diwata’s position on the canvas, right of center, augurs well for ideational presence in today’s world. The generally green color vocabulary reveals the artist’s strong refusal to accept an environment that is now on the throes of pollution. Simply put, Bighani II shows a green environment where our diwatas hold fort and play music. Bighani might as well be Maguindusa, “the most revered and most powerful of the diwatas,” according to National Artist for Dance Ramon A. Obusan.
In Diwata 15, the lady, au naturel, plays her mouth flute, her long tresses swaying leftward without obliterating the flute. She is intertwined with a pictorial red cloth, its wefts in alternation of red-white-red background. The diwata’s half back is completed behind her, also intertwined with the background.
The colors red, white, blue, and the faint yellow at the tip of the flute repeat the colors of the Philippine flag, and therefore point toward the presence of diwatas as parts of the belief systems nationwide.
Babaylans
The babaylan or shaman, known in the North as mandadawak, manalisig, mumbaki, magabang, and manganito, “performs trance dances that conjure up character and settings evoking a sense of wonder and mystery” (Obusan, 2004).
In Babaylan 2 (a babaylan is either a man or a woman), the shaman, almost in full body at the center and doing her act leftward, is in a continuous bodily kinetics. Yellow frames her face down her thighs, with the gradated yellow behind her going down her ankle, thereby dividing the lower half of the composition almost equally. The babaylan’s “crown” of variecolored linear twirls, flowing neckerchief, and equally flowing tapis, form three groups, repeated by the three groups formed by the background space on the left, the babaylan’s figure, and the background space on the right. These three groups, repeated for emphasis, symbolize the three largest island groups in the Philippines. This brings into sharp focus on the presence of babaylans in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
Lotus
The lotus had fascinated Salvosa from the time he took to Zen meditation to the present. Zen meditation, which started in China around A.D. 500, had effected in Salvosa’s works of the subject a confluence or oneness of the phenomenal and essential worlds. In his Pugay 2, for instance, the central flower could be the sacred lotus of India (Nelumbium nelumbo), noted for its fragrant pink or rose flowers. The seven lotus plants of the waterlily family are cut off from their usual large floating leaves to underscore these facts: They are not a photographic portrayal of the plants; rather, they are artistic interpretations to underscore the meaning of seven: eternal. Also, good luck. Seven days a week. Seven days God Almighty gave Himself to create the world, including His day of rest.
Moon
The moon has its own celestial magic despite its brilliance courtesy of the sun. Truth be told: The moon affects the behavior of people, particularly when it is new and full. The word lunatic (luna is the Spanish word for moon) may not exactly be a derogatory term, after all.
Parenthetically, van Gogh never wrote his brother Theo about the moon’s position when he did his masterpiece “The Starry Night,” where everything is in turmoil, except the church almost at the center. True, he was a mad genius. But a genius just the same.
The Mangyans in Mindoro prayed to the moon and asked for forgiveness for man’s transgression when Neil Armstrong landed on the lunar surface in 1969. The Mangyans, like some ethnic groups, worship the moon and some celestial bodies.
Family
Matriarchal is the Filipino family. This generally held belief is posited on the biological/physical domain. The mother carries the baby in her womb for nine months. As truthful as that.
Regardless of environment, bountiful or barren, the mother always connects with the child. As she nurses her baby, she looks at her child. Her baby is her trophy of triumph.
Salvosa intimated this in Mag-ina ng Bundok. And more. The environment tells a gripping reality. Gone is the forest cover. And gone, too, if the Filipino family’s life source by reason of rapaciousness of people who should know better.
Naked now is the environment. But the child must be nursed who, with the young mother, are centrally located and are the foci. Where humanity is in an endangered zone, where the once luscious, dense, and green landscape is now a pallid light green of emptiness, a mother-and-child combine stand guard, with the mother wearing a halo in the form of a hat.
Mag-ina ng Bundok is simple in composition, but powerful in its message.
Salvosa’s works delineate some Filipino belief systems.
