The Grand Scheme of Things is in fact a cast of characters. They have no names. They’re not portraits of actual people. Yet they comprise a dramatis personae–a collective cast of archetypes in Philippine society: the knackered nurse, the bloated politician, the defeated businessman, the supplicating artist, the charlatan faith healer, the imperious nun, the shirtless man slumped over from drink. What may seem to be perceived as a clutch of cliché personalities without real identities are individual embodiments of characters with designated roles in a culture of complicity or inescapable Darwinist hierarchy.

It is fitting that the word schēma means "form, shape, or figure." Lindslee gives form to figures that encapsulate the variable ravages of vice or virtue from lived roles: exhaustion from work; engorgement from greed; the weight of uncertainty; the grip of desperation; faith in the promise of peddled faith; judgment ensuing from a pointed finger in one hand with a church collection basket in the other hand; the stupor from drink to dull the grit of living. 

If these characters are examples of representational art, the figures go beyond the hype of hyperrealism. Trompe l’œil–to fool the eye–in the instance of the drinking man by its lonesome at the ALT fair early this year was acute enough to have set the night guards in a panic when they thought the man was left behind by his buddies. But a beat after the nervous chuckle at being optically had by the illusionism, a deeper read into the figure warrants getting past marveling at the “realness” of the beads of sweat or the painted tattoo. The realism in Lindslee’s work is the means to the end of creating portraits of Filipinos’ reality. The glimmer in the eyes of the politician is made of synthetic material, and yet it strikes fear in the heart of someone coming face to face with the boundless avarice sitting squarely on sacks of rice. You are tempted to stare it down, fully knowing it’s but a resin shell with neither consciousness nor conscience and yet that glimmer makes one seethe.

These figures sitting in a circle as if in a cultish convocation are bookended by a crucifix studded with giant teeth on the far wall and near the gallery entrance, a wall strewn with bones from which the meat appears completely picked off with either human or animal teeth. To the artist, food is an ongoing fascination for the metaphors for excess and depravity, poverty and deprivation that depiction of food offers. Another oversize crucifix is encrusted with clocks ticking upside-down–a contemporary interpretation of the manic rapacity of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. Although Goya’s Saturn is of Kronos, the phonetic similarity to Chronos has made Goya’s Titan King a symbol of Father Time who devours all things. And a proliferation of crucifixes made of old coins no longer in circulation bear the weight and force of the cultural, ideological, and economic power of the church (of different religious denominations) still in currency in the country–in political kingmaking, in criminal conspiracies that include money laundering and bulk cash smuggling, or in political bloc voting.

Two abstract paintings, The Primordial Soup and The Void, serve as formalist visual palate cleansers in this cornucopia of figures and grotesquerie of freaks and dark references. But there are also small birds here and there–perched on walls and on heads as if their tiny feathered frames were little musical notes of levity and hope.

The simulacrum now serves to redirect the real. The circular path makes it possible to return to the real world with eyes refreshed by the detour of fiction.

–Elena Oliveras

Umberto Eco wrote that the “frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories.” Lindslee’s sculptures are inanimate objects that, by themselves, hold no memories but trigger memories of what we fear or desire. The power of symbols can draw millions of devotees to the Nazareno, can draw empathy upon sight of the sheer exhaustion of a sculpture in a nurse’s uniform, can draw revulsion at the simulation of an overweight politician in a shirt drenched in sweat. The detour of fiction in these hyperrealist fakes excavates our own deep wells of faith or cynicism in our fates turning, our drunken state providing temporary escape, our wounds healing, and the voids pulsating with the gleaming possibility of a merciful life.

–Carina Evangelista