BY JAY BAUTISTA |
A deep abiding faith on one’s creativity often comes in the most abstract of expressions and artists like Arel Zambarrano often turnaround something ordinary (this time from his workplace) even bordering on boredom they only know how—using imagination and available mixed media.
Calm in the Surface, Intense Underneath |
A deep abiding faith on one’s creativity often comes in the most abstract of expressions and artists like Arel Zambarrano often turnaround something ordinary (this time from his workplace) even bordering on boredom they only know how—using imagination and available mixed media.
Aside from being an award winning visual artist, Zambarrano has always been
a licensed architect. In his 4th solo exhibition, Flexible Nerves Zambarrano narrates how
he found inspiration among construction workers, basic industrial tools, and
architecture materials transforming them into framed parables using them to
explore important themes such as joys, anger, challenges and inconsistencies
through espousing our emotions, acceptances and resolutions in life. Zambarrano
firmly establishes his personal concepts and creative philosophies--his
relentlessness and inventiveness in the visual arts--in these composed and
solitary pieces, as he addresses social realism in our most basic human condition.
The Molting Stage Will Soon Be Over |
The contemporaneity of Zambarrano’s visual approach as he essays his art
is in the simplest way possible not in complex coded language but in clear
semantics of life: because he believes each contemporary artist should tell us
about current life and the world we share at the moment.
Calm in the Surface, Intense
Underneath represents Zambarrano’s 34 grappling years of
existence. Greeting the viewer as one enters the Ilomoca premises, each concrete
sculptures was prefabricated from his own legs. This is how intensely personal
Zambarrano intimates his art practice—art and life are enmeshed to one another.
Using fiber-reinforced concrete, he installed them upside down projecting grace
and temperance as an artist amidst many contextual professional pressures. He
got the idea upon seeing ducks swimming, tranquil and soft while arduously
paddling. They are serenely floating while settling their survival underneath the deep
water.
Boy-Boy (1/4) |
Zambarrano
has always induced the element of wonder. His materiality
dictates whatever mood he is in depending on what he perceives be it blades,
knives, nails, level bar, used shovels and rubber bands. Zambarrano firmly
believes artists were blessed with talents, as they are expected to be
responsible human beings first in society than the confines of a gallery. As his
daily preoccupation with insurmountable work attending the building of two
island resorts, commercial establishments, and even creation of artist studios
whiling away his time, Zambarrano has found creativity with his industrial surroundings.
This time he favored to prefabricate everything before he even primes his canvases
and overlaying them with another image using acrylic glasses. Exposing texture
he attaches bullet slags, burning leatherette and even pouring crushed gravel
on his site-specific installation. These resources reflect the ordinary,
discarded, unused, and broken materials enabling every brushstroke as diverse
like the different days where Zambarrano worked on his pieces.
Purya Usog |
These pieces appear as visual symbols of unseen realities rendered in
pictorial rhetoric through cultural signifiers that only Zambarrano can
comprehend their symbolical meanings such as knives in Artificial Hindrance. Knives have always been a constant in
Zambarrano’s past exhibits. It represents fear and uncertainty which is a given
in reality. He reclaims what is lacking in its aesthetics and mayhem whether he
renders realist strokes or veers into abstract transparency of forms and
solidity of shapes define the quintessential Zambarrano. One cannot be
overwhelmed by his art pieces, often employing rhythm and harmony in
composition his dimensions draws a thin line in between softness of acrylic
glass and harshness of paint rendition yet they are carefully controlled and
vary at certain points from another not because they are nice to look at but
because they are painstakingly conceived in rendering. Double meaning ensues as
Zambarrano is fond of diversifying perspectives.
His paintings are also sensuous variations of collective narratives,
memories and dreams. The fascination in rough-like surface in his works is
evident in time. It is metaphorical in depiction of this world we live in as
paralleled by a slowly decaying, human body that is deteriorating and will turn
back into nature’s dust--our ashes. Consider Purya Usog which is his ode to his daughter. Not everything is raw
and melancholic yet it is fear conveyed
on his positive vibrations on his daughter as trials and challenges that make
him more human. He and his wife as parents on acrylic glass purifying the image
with bullet slag attached through to be able see its real essence in our
already gruesome and violent world.
Clinched Ethereality |
Zambarrano moves freely inside the painting as he probes his inner self
and explore contours and variations of colors, paraphrasing the mortal world
and beyond in less fanciful embellishment or distortion. His thoughts and
feelings as an artist are astounded in each of the four canvases in Boy-Boy and nine canvases in the Magnanimous grip
series. They feature the images of common people he has accustomed to--construction
workers, pedicab drivers, labourers, farmers, porters, fishermen, etc. He expressively
painted each figure allowing them to stand out against obscurity. It is being
overlaid with transparent acrylic glass etched with outlines of juxtaposed ants
intended to receive numbers of actual bullet slags on informal frame which in
turn holds the dysfunctional level bar. With the reflection of Zambarrano,
magnanimous grip series portrays courage beyond social injustice.
Ever the grateful, The Molting
Stage Will Soon Be Over pays homage to an early influence, Allain Hablo. The celtic pattern overlay on acrylic glass is reminiscent of Hablo's previous masterpiece, I am Who I am. Hablo symbolizes those first and second generation of Ilonggo artists who stayed awake when it
was still dark in the Visayan art scene. Hablo holds a stature in Iloilo--how
one can be commercially successful without compromising one’s art. Hablo has
been their pride in Visayan art as seen in the rawness and integrity of his
being an artist at the onset of his career. He chose to stay in Iloilo because this where
the “creative war,” without the benefit of convenience or the luxury of
appreciating their art--to survive one must tell our own stories from our own
experiences. Zambarrano does not want to lose his bearings and keep his feet
rooted on the ground. He continues to stay in Iloilo as the conflict surges.
Post Inner Torment (using blades) |
One can almost smell his coloration in Clinched Ethereality wherein
rubber bands are actually landscapes dwelling intuitively into his subconscious mind.
His composition of colors range from cool to earthy hues, these are vivid
projections of his dreams and aspirations. Skulls have always figures in
Zambarrano’s iconography, they value living like a memento mori despite prevalent poverty all around. This represents the
beauty of impermanence.
Given the current art scene’s infatuation with hyperrealism, auction-bound,
emo-ridden parlance, Flexible Nerves
has an in-your-face realism coming at you. Against the hushed solitude of
Ilomoca, Zambarrano’s pieces shout out loud and roughs up bad your composure.
They may not be polite and pleasing to the eyes, he then proceeds to rearrange
your sense of reality and positions to make you feel what it is to be truly
human.
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