EXHIBITED WORKS
Tall Gallery, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound
Another Disaster
by Lara De Los Reyes
November 4 to 23, 2010
“The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind.”
- William S. Burroughs
Remarking on science fiction films, critic and cultural observer Susan Sontag wrote that, rather than science, the driving impetus behind these productions is destruction. “They are about disasters, which is one of the oldest subjects of art,” she explains, perhaps alluding to the fact that the cataclysmic tale predates modern science by thousands of years. “(S)cience fiction allegories are one of the myths about—that is, one of the ways of accommodating to and negating—the perennial human anxiety about death.” (Indeed, many of the greatest novels ever written—not necessarily sf—can be read as prolonged suicide notes.) The truly great texts of the 20th century from Gray’s Anatomy to the tales that comprise H.P. Lovecraft’s so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” do not express any angst towards the death but rather indulge in its thanatoid pleasures. To quote Bakunin: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion.”
Lara de los Reyes’ current exhibition, Another Disaster, is the artist’s third major exhibition and is the eschatological summing up of her work so far. Here, she celebrates as well as lays waste to her past oeuvre, offering up an entire apocalypse as the ultimate kiss-off. (After all, in biblical terms, “apocalyptic” is derived from the Greek word for unveiling and for “the Elect this means not catastrophe but salvation.”) The eight large canvasses sees her taking on various forms of painting from portraiture to still life to landscapes but perverted to her idiosyncratic ends. The ceramic cake served up inside the “salon” is decorated with the ceramic corpse of a rodent and lit by butts of cigarettes. (The latter numbering “13” to be exact, perhaps another occult reference?) Even the artist’s own hands—in what might seem the ultimate act of self-immolation—are depicted in sculpture as only skeletons.
“(T)he planet the writer destroys with such tireless ingenuity is in fact an image of the writer himself,” writes J.G. Ballard, who also cites psychiatric studies into the fantasies if the insane (also manifested in their art) of the prevalence of ideas of world destruction. “It presents a constructive and positive act of the imagination.” Which we can take to mean that, it only gets more interesting post-resurrectio. It certainly worked for Jesus, didn’t it?
text by Erwin T. Romulo
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