Kim Hamilton Sulit: Beauty of Impermanence

BY JAY BAUTISTA |

Art is but a preparation for that bigger art—the art of Living.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

Indian Curator

 

For Kim Hamilton Sulit creating art has been an effective way to cope up with his insecurities, anxieties, and struggles in life in a decade of art practice. His creative becoming has made him survive afloat—barely grasping for breath--despite harsh realizations of espousing the contemporary as an artist based in the cultural town of Angono. How his past solo and group exhibitions have displayed his authenticity to the way his life phases have evolved both in his personal memories and direct experiences towards the community around him.

Weight of Time

When Sulit started conceptualizing for this exhibition last January, as if by circumstance, Taal Volcano erupted and caused chaos all throughout. For ten days, the fortuitous event killed 39 people and affected most people living as far as Ilocos Region, Central Visayas and displacing folks from towns in Batangas near Taal Lake. Everyone was at a standstill causing Sulit in extreme anxiety and doubly checking on his artistic realities.

Cement Garden (in detail)

By March due to the circumstances beyond our control, the ongoing coronavirus epidemic became full blown world-wide. It has placed the entire country on various stages of community quarantines by the national government. There were times when Sulit would wake up early, put on his mask on his face, walk up to his studio only to straddle in front of his stretched white canvases. He would blankly stare on them for hours and just be with his paint tubes and brushes. Amidst temporary work stoppage and optional work from home scheme Sulit’s went on with his intensive creative foray. And this is what the exhibition Weight of Time unravels.

Blemish Series, The Wall and Cement Garden

Upon entering the gallery spaces, one is greeted with The Wall, a concrete ambience recording the pandemic--a gentle reminder how Sulit’s waking hours were well spent during the lockdown.

Taking the form from a cast of his right arm, The Wall imprints scenes during the past months in a tattoo-like manner. Filling it up like a street graffiti it is a raw statement of how we have adopted to the “new normal” and how we were fit enough to still be alive. Seeing The Wall makes one grateful and value that Sulit has lived to paint these cherished moments and eventually raised our arms testifying that we are still surviving through unscathed.

A recurring theme for Sulit are the Blemish series which are intimate take on mortality and vulnerability. Often emanating ghoulishness he approximates how the images would result when they decayed or even exaggeratedly distorted.

Blemish Series

started in 2012 under a different title when he saw the album cover of Bjork’s “Medulla” and later found some old photographs from the Victorian period to be too perfect and archaic. It was too enticing for Sulit not to take a pun at the intended idealist portraits. Years later he did another Blemish Series reacting to paintings by the Old masters. He had a fresh attack on them, portraying them pale with black blood oozing from their weary eyes.

Blemish Series III

Blemish III Series has been percolating on his mind for a long time. He knew the moment has come as he invited family, friends, fellow artists, and even his collectors to submit their mug shot photos. Concurrently, he also sought their permission if he can have a free reign to alter its form.

Sulit contends that his Blemish series vary on every occasion he churns them out. Blemish Series reminded one certain artistic reactions upon the saturation of a particular art movement. Such as Mannerist tendencies reacted in the High Renaissance during the 16^th century before Baroque ushered in. For Sulit they simply exude the beauty of impermanence; that we are susceptible and will eventually perish someday. A kind of memento mori so to speak.

Expect Sulit to unapologetically explore the defining mood to a certain sentimentality in every Blemish portrayal there is. After looking long and hard, he takes a swipe using his own figurative interpretation based on one’s resemblance. His Blemish Series seems his direct reply to these trying and difficult times. Sulit further dwells deeper and more emphatic in every portrait he does creating a multitude of rogue-like ghosts peaking at the gallery’s onlookers. In a way it comforts Sulit that he is not alone in his paranoia as he becomes disturbed with the ongoing covid-19 crisis while indignantly creating them in his studio.

Evolving further around memory and loss is Cement Garden, an assemblage of found objects mostly discarded toys, dolls, cars, wooden figurines. Using a custom-made brick-maker Sulit appropriates and pours cement on them mixing them with volcanic ash from Taal to exude framed parables scattered all over the floor.

Cement Garden affirms Sulit’s penchant with representation through his use of found, discarded and even used mostly mundane objects prevalent in our everyday lives; how their relationship with one another—placed side by side--in a meticulously crafted assemblages enables new definitions and meanings. Similar to tombs of curiosities including partitions, Sulit pays homage to the core of materiality by integrating them into a new order, providing their rebirth in another context wrought through time.

Veering away from pure painting, Sulit experiments, even escapes, with temporal things and their possibilities in forms taking different metaphors. Sulit has an ardent propensity in seeking de-familiarization of context into fresh perspectives with their new integration. Consider it an aftermath following the Taal misfortune.

Sulit has crafted idea of containment through assemblages each pertaining to a thematic mood. The more objects there are, the more stories they yield. There are no titles to each receptacle as their provenance vary from his personal stuff to children’s toys to broken down figurines. Some objects are fragments from constant usage--creating an eerie feel like a cinematic finish Sulit envisions.

Spontaneity is key in Sulit composition. He espouses some basic tenets in what art exhibitions could aspire for—constant acceptance of flux, repetitions and cycles, and relinquishing all complex attachments. It is raw and visceral focusing more of the play of the real and unreal.

Sulit has been influenced by American photographer Sally Mann (b.1951) who also happens to dwell on mortality and vulnerability using subjects such as herself and her own immediate family as subjects of her portraits. Her haunting human form and hometown landscapes done in platinum prints and polaroid still lifes are bold, lyrical and captured in near abstraction. Sulit is as intensely emotional as Mann. Both of them are enriched by their treatise on the tragedies of the human condition.

Weight of Time provides the viewer the necessary pause from an overloaded art scene. It has an in-your-face aesthetic as Sulit unloads his burden by eschewing on materialist permanence. One is led to a bare essence when things are broken down and starkly simple. There is art when there is life.

Self Portrait

Weight of Time is ongoing at the Blanc Gallery until November 28.

Ramel Villas is Homegrown

BY JAY BAUTISTA |

The long yet evocative history of Philippine art is replete with self-taught artists who have been struggling hard to be identified. They feel they can be creative enough and endowed with the same working hands to fill up a canvas or two. Not since becoming the first apprentices who assisted the masters in depicting murals in churches and public buildings have they emerged from a more practical need as they could not afford or were excluded from the formal fine art schools since the early 19^th century. This probably explains why most of our earliest surviving religious and genre paintings and portraits from this period were standardly unsigned. They remain admired yet unrecognized to this day. Aesthetically, there seems to be a folk-like style in terms of how they freely compose their images from imagination, something unobtrusive with how they compose their subjects.

One such painter is Angono-based painter Ramel Villas. Although very much of what he knows is similar to visual oiuido, the art of Villas displays unrefined yet lush imagination. He proudly confesses he does not suffer from any lack of self-esteem or does not longs for the company for other artists brought about by his lack of a fine arts diploma. Even in Angono where he is based, in this highly artistic small town of Botong Francisco with a living school of more self-taught artists inspired by his apprentices, Villas still remains an outsider. Never mind it was just a mere coincidence that the Villas had decided to find a studio there for his art practice.  

The Novelist, Oil on Canvas 48 x 36 inches, 2012

Fond of that sentimental old world charm, it was that endangered yet functional typewriter, smacked right on an intense man’s head in The Novelist that got me interested to write about Villas. How this haggard-looking mustached man with his bloodshot eyes contemplates the viewer, compelling him to stare some more in the process. One immediately notices the rough texture of Villas’ brushstrokes, devoid of any of that Photoshop application commonly used these fast paced days. The viewer is further drawn deeper to his playground of metaphors: how Villas hands you the perspective, leaving you how to come up with your own version of such hopscotch narrative. A unicorn evoking attention while a castle of a bygone era looms. Given their desperate stance are the lovers who are about to part ways? And with time against their side, the option to escape as imposed by the hot air balloon remains to be the only spurious option. Their only moment is now.

More than decorative in intent, Villas uses symbols so well, functioning like some guide you that hint as how to conjure up with your perspective of the story. 

Mr. Brightside, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2012

Art writer Philip Paraan who wrote on Villas one-man exhibition at the Galerie Anna (where most of these pieces were hanged) commented that these artworks “as vessels of thought, his paintings evoke hope and the intention to find beauty and harmony in chaos. This artist has been known to paint lush and detailed compositions, at times remarked to be even too detailed if not lacking focus or what others would say, an image overload. But such is the visual gambit that Villas embraces, to achieve a dynamic spread and dispersion in unity where all elements can be focal at any given time.”   

Mr. Brightside seems to be the perfect painting for this season of joy and hope. In fact Villas volunteers to infect you with his luminous message of positivity. Villas adds: Clear sight, happy inside, I am Mr. Bright side. Part of my process is to just keep painting as my thoughts flash with images from dreams. With the smiling face with a butterfly for an eye in front of you one explores various icons that is close to the subject matter i wanted. It is like connecting to the audience, like surprising 
someone by showing your face.

  

Feria, Oil on Canvas.48 x 36 inches, 2013 

Placing third at the Art Association of the Philippines National Art Competition in 2009 made Villas decide to be a full-time painter. He was also finalist in this year’s Tanaw: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas National Painting Competition with his work Feria (Latin for "free day").

Feria, as part of the fiesta, is his tribute to this dying culture of honoring the patron saints of towns. Villas realized: art as a wonderful blessing that is delightful to share. I might say that I'm just telling stories in a visual manner however I'm not a preacher. All I want for people is to see my stories. It will be a delight if people will find something essential in my works.

Oftalmologo is an example of that he has what comprises as “three stars and the sun” sentiment. Having some sense of history induced in this piece while displaying his usual take at various levels of interpretations. A wall-bound Jose Rizal field trip if you may, everything you need to know in a capsule: The feathered plume with his writings, the crocodile reference in his novel El Filibusterismo, the soup heater (not lamp as others claim) where his Huling Paalam was safely kept, the love of his life. As an ophthalmologist, he is also a figurative seer of our nation’s future. On this day of his martyrdom, Villas piece philosophically asks where are we in seeing the vision of what Rizal saw.

Like a reverend soul trapped in a 31 year old body, Villas who is the eldest in a brood of five from Quezon province, considers his depictions to be his longings. The layered images on top his main subjects are “his thoughts out loud.” He volunteers to add: I will always wonder about works of Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. Magic comes in appearance of daubs and slashes of paints in raw, loaded with emotions. In painting manner I'm respect tradition. Meanwhile, Salvador Dali sparks confidence in me in letting my dreams out.

Oftalmologo, Oil on Canvas. 48 x 24 inches, 2012

Reviewing the works of Villas the science writer Philip Jose Farmer comes to my mind. Farmer had his Riverworld series where he would often interlude real personalities like Mozart, Jack London met with his fictional characters in another world. Remember this was started in the 70s thus it was political, pleasurable and personal (even Farmer was there in his stories). A critic said it was “theology, pornography in an adventure.” Think Sir Richard Burton meeting Mark Twain. Like Farmer, the possibilities are without boundaries and Villas is just warming up.

Paraan unravels some more for Villas: His emblematic game purposely rearranges, in a playful and curious way, images and themes with known and immediate references showing his penchant for jolting images with such flexibility. His canvases produce such mingling of elements and understated juxtapositions that usually transcend time and boundaries and even cultural affinities as if they refuse to stay in their domain and normal associations. With his consistent mutation of usage and context in symbols, he seems to acts against the mechanistic way of seeing and representation but in the end results in with terrific cumulative energies and awe. Like a steady flowing stream, his art he could sound the mind’s dark depths more subtly than would the overtly grotesque and disturbing juxtapositions.

Villas explains more on his process: Creating a piece is a form of meditation for me. Every work is like a journal but not all of them are my own stories, but extract of my observation. Images around are symbols. I don't consider them as support, but they are the essence and the heart of the piece. It is a challenge for me to put together symbols that most of the time people may find irrelevant and image overload. One goal in my composition is to find harmony over chaos.

In the midst of burgeoning art fairs and biennales where art concepts literally occupy spaces in a room, there seems to be a lack discourse and discussing much about two-dimensional paintings. The belief that a canvas can still sum up one’s thoughts is still startling and quite comforting. This untrained yet skillful should we say “craftsman” like Villas, whatever he lacked in acquired rudiments in the classroom, he very well make up with the forcefulness of his brushstrokes with organic originality.