Brain Storm by Patrick D. Flores If art is inherently disorder, its modernity intrinsically a negation, how else could its rationality be conceived if not in terms of a redemptive gesture? Thus, the madness of it actually assures its reason. Without it, it is just pure institutionalization of structure and market -- and, surely, the condition that is “art,” again in the “institutional” sense. When Pipo Alido shares the story that he does art in the half-light of a syndrome, self-consciously talking about the range of feelings of paranoia, depression, panic, and hallucination, we realize that he exceeds the norm of what we know of as the willful act of art making. The question posed to us in the face of this state has something to do with how we fathom the agency of this talent. And the talent is promising. His pictorial landscape is robust, teeming with figures and flourishes, the colors vivid, iridescent even, and the strokes are obsessive in a devotional way: meditative, punctilious, and brooking no imperfection. Having said that, it is also uncultivated, organic, naif, autodidactic. There is a great deal of the dream and the reverie in this motley scenario as in the piece Nightmare, which is suspended in some narcotic realm. But the grasp of design is disciplined, too, as may be gleaned in the conjuration of fire or skin, cartoon or clothing, nature, viscera and excess. The work Takbo (Run) is a tour de force, attesting to the form-making capacities of the artist’s sensibility and his savvy in composing plethora and minutiae. His inspiration in his youth was the comics, drawn to Spawn and Todd McFarlane, fascinated with copious details. He confides that he treasures nuance, with the image achieving full potential either up-close or from afar. There is a painstaking process involved in this pursuit as layer upon layer is sensitively built up to cohere into a phantasmagoria. There are many ways to spin Alido’s tale. It could be romanticized as genius to which the annals of art history are not a stranger. It could also be construed as trauma, a wound in the mind that festers and haunts, that ails. Flaudette May Datuin’s reflection on the work of the exacting artist Rowena Seloterio, a “schizophrenia survivor,” is a symptom of this disposition. She writes: “As I perceive the dance of lines, dots and dashes that ‘kiss and cross and connect’ across the page, I am driven to construe them as more than just signifiers or symbols (such as water symbolizing healing) – they do in fact, resist interpretation or explanation of what the work is about. And rather than saying that the work is a form of therapy, I would rather feel and perceive the shapes less as traces of pain therapeutically exorcised than actions that physically manifest themselves as ‘repetitions in recollection.’ The artist acts out the traumatic memory and ‘reproduces it not as a memory but as an action’ and ‘repeats it…precisely because it is repressed’ or cannot be done in reality, as the artist puts it with disarming simplicity.” As Seloterio herself unburdens: “That which I cannot do in reality, I remake in my painting.” But there is another way to sense this, and here we turn to the insights of Robert Desjarlais in his work on selfhood and sanity among the homeless. He cites the concept of “struggling along,” perceived as a modality in which people live their daily lives in spite of great adversity. According to him: “To ‘struggle along’ was to proceed with great difficulty while trying at times to do away with or avoid the constraints and hazards strewn in one’s path. The struggles implied strenuous efforts against opposition, hitting up against a world filled with noise, voices, bodies, pains, distractions, poverty, displacements, and bureaucratic powers. The process was double-edged, for while it involved the idea of carrying on with difficulty, it also spoke of the effort to avoid or do away with difficulties, hassles or constraints – to the point, at times, of trying to block out everything in seeking a ‘degree-zero’ way of being.” Alido’s art at first glance appears to have the look of low-brow, wrought perhaps in subcultures that have become part of the lifestyle of an emerging global cosmopolis. The unnameable reality is part of this language, characters crawling out of an invented mediascape, poaching on the pastiche of popular culture and lacing it with personal imagery that makes light of scandal. But Alido does not have the grit and the scatology of someone like Robert Langenegger who is more insolent in his assault on social and moral orthodoxies and more painterly in his approach. He leans closer to Louie Cordero, less anxious and more ludic, impish and elfin, given to the graphic as well as to the grotesque, not iconoclastic but adequately fantastic in a homespun way. We discern in Alido’s works a more trance-like quality, with a keen attention to pattern and repetition. Anthropologists have spoken of pattern not merely as convention or formula to be imitated nearly by rote, but as a schema, in fact, of the open-endedness of the “social.” This might be Alido’s way of reaching out to the world that surrounds him through an eccentric instinct that only he could place. In this way, his art ceases to be beyond our reckoning, and hopefully, beyond the reification as well of the picturesque or the peculiar that may be exploited as trend or vogue or curiosity in the schizophrenic market. The title of his exhibit pleads his existential case: Declaration of Independence: My Right to Madness. The temptation is for many to reduce certain afflictions of the mind to psychosis. In Philippine culture, this means stigma and loss of self: nawawala sa sarili. We need to reframe our psychotherapic imaginations and see the malady as a socially contingent revelation, a “sensible ecstasy.” After all, in the allegories of Filipino freedom, two distinct images surface: Juan Luna’s Spoliarium and Benedicto Cabrera’s Sabel. The former evoked by an artist-patriot who practically went amok in Paris in a crime of passion and the latter, the image of a demented woman vagrant in Bambang, clad in billowing transparent drapery that transfigures into a nation cloaked in found fabric. Pipo Alido’s art takes us back to what may well be forgotten origins, the pathology of the colonial syndrome and the disorder of art.