MANILA, Philippines -- Paintings of iconic--and dead--figures hang in Altro Mondo, a gallery centrally located in that luxury shopping haven, Greenbelt 5 in Makati City. Given their status and luminous names, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Gandhi, Bruce Lee, Jose Rizal, among others, may seem out of place in the hubbub of commerce marked with posters of pretty young things hawking anything from designer clothes to expensive travel trunks. And yet, if the artist of the exhibit titled I'll Do Anything for Peace and Freedom (on view until Oct. 16) is to be believed, these icons are no different from the latter in that they also symbolically proffer a product: the possibility of and aspiration for Utopia.
Toti Cerda, whose long career in the art world has been characterized with paintings of lyrical streetside and countryside scenery full of children that seem to be immune from suffering, would be the first one to admit that he's not one to delve into a socio-realist strain. But something in him did change or more specifically occur: a maturing vision and sensibility. ''I realized that art can become a vehicle for a message,'' he said.
This message, he felt, shouldn't appear radicalized. Rather than depicting flayed bodies representing the cause of the suffering mass or the toppling of physical structures alluding to the destruction of Capitalism, the artist cherry-picked among legions of iconic figures from the West (with the exception of Rizal who, come to think of it, possesses an international profile) and metaphorically asked them what they can do for peace. Chaplin finally opens his mouth (having no need to do so, being the superstar of silent films), Monroe dons a nun's habit (as opposed to a dress with a swirl of a skirt), Gandhi wears a leather jacket and is about to sing (as if to prove that he too knows levity), Bruce Lee becomes a clown (foregoing his martial arts garb and gesture) while Rizal takes up armed struggle (a complete opposition to what the real Rizal believed in).
Irony seems to be the underlying current in I'll Do Anything for Peace and Freedom and it's transparently evoked that just by looking at one painting, one already gets the entire picture, so to speak. Toti revealed that he planned to caption each of the paintings with a soundbite but he was dissuaded to do so since it would not only clutter the portraits but also make redundant the message that has already been clearly conveyed. The deeper irony, however, lies in the fact that given that all the figures are dead, they are theoretically powerless to enact any meaningful political change. Yes, some of them continue to influence the living by way of their legacy, their writing and their philosophy but their irrevocable deadness make them as inert, as opposed to dynamic, force
The fact that the artist felt liberally able to use these profiles without the thought of censure highlights how resistant their self-mythology is from tampering. In a way, the icons have been turned into caricatures, despite the seeming feel-good tone of the artistic intent. When you see Jesus (in another painting) doing the peace sign while wearing a pendant that is the symbol of peace, your initial reaction is to laugh and not to buy into the ideal he is supposedly espousing. Humor is the veneer that sustains this exhibit. Without it, the figures in the artworks would simply be glamorized puppets.
What is admirable is that Cerda is unafraid to take on, interrogate and disrupt the lexicon of the legendary, using them as his own focusing lens for what he believes constitutes the notion of peace and freedom, or probably a general sense of betterment: self-sacrifice, the destruction of the self's old vessel. In a way, Cerda, by veering away from his postcard perfect paintings, also underwent a veritable transformation, an act that doesn't always need to be radical and self-exfoliating.
