:. Fragments of Incantations : Mario de Rivera : Hiraya

MARIO de Rivera, in his ongoing show at the Hiraya (until June 25), best exemplifies the art of the expatriate whose work does not tolerate boundaries. His work is where meaning simply does not stop at the frame.

His show is provocatively splendid, an iconographic intensification of the contemporary experience, filled with poetic responses to modern themes and issues.

Having been bypassed at the 2000 Philip Morris Art Awards, for his seminal work in mixed media, "Ghosts of Dragons and Emperors," for reasons known only to the jury, De Rivera, a product of the University of Santo Tomas, has written his own exegesis with a stunning collection he calls "Fragments of Incantation," which includes "Nuestra Eden Perdido," which received the Excellence Award at the 2003 Beppu Asia Contemporary Art Exhibition in Japan.

Though he has, at the moment, taken residence in a Manila suburb, De Rivera continues to shuttle between the Philippines and Australia, where his Filipina wife works. He has also traveled extensively (he stayed for seven years in China).

These foreign sojourns have helped shape a cultural memory grounded on loss and dispersal. Like the Jewish experience, his sojourn is one that discovers roots in the face of constant wanderings.

De Rivera's work paints a visionary picture of his own coming of age. In "Perfect Age," a triptych, like most of the pieces assembled here, the artist brings together references to his life's milestones (he turned 50 recently), images of people, places and events, ranging from snapshots of his nine-year-old son to photo-transfers of bikers racing through an idyllic countryside, and his own dream of paradise going up in a cloud, or, more aptly, in a maze of memory.

In "Lagum," De Rivera goes back in time to the primeval forest of his childhood, lodged somewhere in the fastnesses of Cagayan Valley, inhabited by exotic-looking creatures, and constantly buffeted by the waves of history, a recurring image that symbolizes journey and renewal.

With De Rivera's inimitable technique of combining collage, pastiche and illustration, adroitly enhanced by applications of modeling paste, the maze of imagery presses upon the eye and conjures an irresistibly redemptive effect.

Similar in spirit is "Jardin Botanico," where the artist expounds on the subject of women as nurturers of life, while around are flora abloom, an image that, though a bit too stretched for comfort, is redeemed by its admirable delicacy of spirit. Not to mention the sexually pregnant invocation, which suffuses De Rivera's art.

Another triptych, "The Eighth Moon," shows two women with sharply indigenous character but fully garbed in resplendent Chinese apparel and with domestic appurtenances. Framing the image is a finely detailed arch of Chinese character, while the moons above the women seem to signal the changing seasons-or evolving epochs-so delicately etched in the gradating shades of blue color.

The most powerful imagery to this viewer is "Cordon de la Eternidad," a three-paneled work where the iconography of women central to De Rivera's work is depicted in all their religious, mythical and historical contexts. Juxtaposed in the middle panel are portraits of women from the past and present-as saint, muse and all-suffering mother cradling her babe in the manner of the piety, the last culled from the embattled region of war-torn Muslim countries.

On both side panels are found more images of women culled from the works of masters, freely strewn like a hothouse of women conspiring.

Finally, there is the Beppu-winning piece, "Nuestra Eden Perdido" (Our Lost Eden), a larger-than-average triptych, with a pastoral scene that conjures all that is vital to De Rivera's art-making.

From the signature photo-transfer technique to the mutedly brilliant hues, the work is both an elegy and a celebration, a magisterial opus that reveals the artist's personal view of the Filipino and what has become of him, so brilliantly encapsulated in those iconographic symbols drawn from the forces of history, religion and the paradoxical power of art to leave the mind filled with a powerful sense of what is missing.