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.

Jared Yokte: The Artist as Contrarian

BY JAY BAUTISTA |

The recent third solo exhibition At the Rear There is Something Contrary by Jared Yokte is one long loud sermon. His distinct unskinned images haunt us in our thoughts even after the pieces have been taken down from the walls of blanc Gallery. Mind you it is not exactly a solitary preach by a priest, pastor or what have you. More inclined to that night the adolescent you went home beyond curfew time and your parents were stubbornly waiting as you opened the house lights. Yes this exhibit is that bad that it is so good. Worse, it alters your mindset in looking at contemporary paintings these days.

At the Rear There is Something Contrary

Having been born and bred in Davao City, educated in Vigan and now based in Tarlac Yokte sizzles as the quintessential artist to finely execute these epiphanies. Having been exposed to different variants of local culture from southern to northern Philippines Yokte has somehow imbibed and could comment on that customary sense of we got used to yet not supposedly believing in.

His interiors as backdrops are from his humble abode reflect the kind of exuberant yet bland society we have ever since existed. Not invited guests rather we are like peeping neighbors to one's private tableau as everything happens indoors. It is at home where much of what we know happens even the greater war is waged here—the family.

Theory of Nonsense 1

Our elders inculcate in us that success emanates in being affluent more so if one is working abroad. One gets educated to prepare for the day he boards a ship or a plane to cross to the greener pastures. As clannish as we can be, we look after siblings after us, forced to fend for their schooling, whereas we tend to neglect even our own personal happiness. These stereo-type myths have bothered and even disturbed the peace in Yokte's sensibilities. Even superstitious beliefs, superfluous as they are, are discussed within this realm. Concepts like sukob, pagpag, pasma or sleeping while your hair is wet could make you go blind or crazy. Yokte proposes not in anger but even better he gracefully throws back at you his actuation in his linear and painterly strokes combined. The title piece, At the Rear There is Something Contrary, sees us involved in every movement as his images compose themselves and somewhat paused on canvas. They circle in round formation as the cycle called life rotates.

Theory of Nonsense 2

Theory of Nonsense Series symbolically implodes deeper this thesis in Yokte’s pieces. Composition is Yokte’s stronger elements as he is a master in harmonizing his hues. Personages lie afloat living in the quagmire we deserve. We, the viewer should not be enticed in these time-drawn myths. Inverted umbrellas reveal the reverse reasoning as we are attuned to. Resulting into the kind of broken dreams we are forced by circumstance to accept these false fatuity. As in these paintings, it is as grim as the night that has befallen and an even darker interior void of light. Yokte maybe an animal lover as it seems but these domestic creatures are no different from the kind of beings we have become, or been relegated to.

There is poetry in rendering his cast of characters. A headless man may seem a wounded negation of people eaten by the kind of heartlessness that emanates from our concurrence to what we thought all along as truth. Have we become the kind of children our parents have warned us to be? Only artists like Yokte can create such dormant scenes that feed on life’s imperfections done beautifully. As he investigates into our human condition what he unravels like secrets to a code yields our               uniqueness as it is ironically present in all of us.

When the Cat Fell Out

When the Cat Fell Out debunks that what we chose to blindly submit. Black cats represent impending bad luck whereas a cat can just be born black. Maybe Yokte’s works are even the bigger contrary to what is evidently contemporary art—white canvases featuring personalities as smiling farmers, mother and child, even coy fish on the pond. The presence of black mud-like paint is not to blot the picture but a pun right smack as intended. Being in Tarlac provides his with a vantage point--a way of seeing. He is far yet inside the art scene. Even he can be his own sordid critic.

Counterpole

One can however never get over viewing a Yokte piece. One is unmindful of the time as he was doing them. The gestalt effect that his canvases are bigger than what and how his symbolism applies. At a glance, macabre as it is, each is like rich thick moist chocolate cake with sprinkles for everyone to partake. Such as Counterpole which is a continuing reminder of the ups and downs of life reminiscent of the circus act as in his last show, Mabulaklaking Angkan. Compared to this present crop, whatever these pieces lack in humor accessibility and accessories Yokte made up with much bravura and immensely finer craft--more mature brushstrokes and a serious take on our contemporary culture. I would not be surprised if these solitary creatures will be ready to come closer and bite back at us in his next show.