EXHIBITED WORKS
Tall Gallery, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound
Ink Slingers
by Bembol De La Cruz
July 9 - August 4, 2009
Pliny the Elder’s account of the origin of painting seemed to classify it as essentially a portrait. This as to deduce it from the attempts of Corinthian maiden Dibutades to trace the likeness of her lover even as a silhouetted profile from a shadow cast by a single light on a wall. The motive for which was to serve as a memento in his absence. Jan Willem-Dikkers, in an introduction to the unwavering role of portraiture and its persistent relevance in the practice of image making further reiterates that such an instinct stems from it being “ the most common type of visual language” that articulates such impulse in affixing relationships between people and “lived experiences” within those relationships.[1] All such markings which may be rudimentarily made as a pictogram comprising of a circle, 2 dots and a line, or as complexly modeled by pigment to effect contour and tone, serve to quantify and establish identity, hence encompass our dealings with this world of appearances that inevitably ingrains itself indelibly on our memories.
American portraitist Chuck Close through his large canvases that resemble a patchwork of shapes and color to envisage a human face evinces this idea of portrait being “essentially an assemblage of ‘marks on a flat surface”’. Any manic impulse to surface décor seems privy to such tendencies as how the practice of tattooing likewise stains skin indefinitely with marks of a highly coded pictorial system whose meanings layer with the passage of time and with the gradual shedding and creasing of the epidermis.
The very practice of painting is grounded however on this layering and this is much apparent in Bembol dela Cruz’s works wherein he has continually employed a process that merges the hyper-realism based on the acuities of rendering the photographic copy and the corporeal verisimilitude of an actual object. This as seen in his past sets of paintings such as Aerial Landscape where pictures of bombed cities during WWII were superimposed by trompe l’oleil renderings of scale model airplane kits still attached to their plastic mold connector cases; and in the series entitled Measures in which cities that have fallen prey to terrorist attacks were overlaid by a “life-like” painted replica of various types of measuring sticks. In his series Accidental Abstraction, the same process has been utilized digressing only in cropping his subjects to present a more abstract view of hoods, fenders and doors of crashed motor vehicles. These were brushed over by a thick gash of pure pigment that are supposed to reveal the under paint of such surfaces from such violent collision, resulting in a study of contrast of forms and surface treatment.
In doing his series of previous portraits of friends with tattoos, including his self-portraits, Dela Cruz had approximate the process of tattooing in laying down the ground or the “skin” before carefully modeling the painted reproduction of these tattoos. Yet in these paintings, their faces are not shown. In his self-portraits, his head is obscured by a gas mask, his other subjects had their backs turned towards the viewer. They remain anonymous save for the tattoos that they bear on their skin which only hints at their identity.
Ink Slingers, Dela Cruz’s third installment of his continuing series of portraits of friends in the tattoo trade, contrasts in the disclosure of their identity by his subjects’ full-on gaze towards the viewer, the sheer size on which they project this gaze and how each of these panels are so named. Still these are painted in the same manner by which his previous portraits had been made – on a dark under paint of a combination of raw umber and creamish ochre then gradually build-up to several layers of paint that make up flesh and its subtle nuances that have ravaged it by experience, in the deepened furrows, darkening stubbles, reddening pockmarks, knowing smirks, the general grit of their physiognomic character that individuates them. This is in lieu of tattoos that had singled them out before in their previous portraits.
Seen collectively, these portraits cohere as though bound by an implicit connection that belies the close-knit community of the trade they practice more than their common kinship with Dela Cruz who himself had practiced tattooing before formally focusing on painting. Segued in this parallel logic is a pair of portraits that depict a boy and an old man who both belong to a Konyak head-hunting tribe and so noticeably recognized for their facial tattoos.
the rest and display his affinities.
As much as painting genres are typified by the very means by which they are made as to its compositional arrangement, medium used, subject matter, historical tradition and stylistic approach, the practice of tattooing can be said to subscribe to the same formulaic tropes and it is in this fashion that these are differentiated and by which its subsequent practitioners chooses their specialization. As much as these can be typified by their formal style or by their customary method of their application, so are certain subcultures or cliques or ethnic tribes consequently recognized.
the rest and display his affinities.
It is however, a primal urge, for man to amplify further his individuality beyond what his genetic makeup has bestowed him upon birth. Yet he cannot bear this much isolation that this has to be balanced out by his other pressing need to belong, that the clothes, the ornaments, the tattoos he chooses to permanently stain his skin may serve as his personal emblem that would both single him out from the rest and display his affinities.
The reason for portrait painting, therefore, only reinforces this need and how the whole of humanity becomes aware of its own being by mirroring this awareness on others drawn out of empathy for such universal longing to be.
[1] Influence. Issue no. 2. 2004.NY, NY.
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