Three Graces

by Alice G. Guillermo
Today's Weekender, March 2, 2003

Women’s art is significantly enriched by the works of three artists, Deborah Del-Pan, Lily Avila Wuzela and Teresita Mapua, which now grace the Hiraya Gallery in their joint exhibit Explosions, Interiors, Revelations. They bring to the fore a new aspect of women’s art which is highly personal and yet universal in meaning, an art that draws from women’s innermost resources and particular ways of seeing and feeling without being too self-consciously feminist. Their soft feminism, however, is one that gives value to their gender-inscribed temperaments, attitudes and insights that find expression in their art. Sharing an intense and reflective tone, they eschew the brightly noisy and institutionalized reactions to present-day reality and thereby provide deeper levels of signification.

The subject of woman’s personal identity is particularly brought up in the works of Deborah Del-Pan, though this is also an underlying strain in the other artists. Hawaiian-born Del-Pan shows this concern in two portraits, the first of a young woman, highly particularized in her features and looking pale and emaciated by some private torment. In the surrealist vein, a rope passes through her head and then breaks off even as the small figure of herself is saved by a projecting plank upon which she jumps in a "leap of faith."

The second portrait, Interior (triptych), is a striking work in which the woman subject is situated within a setting of rooms which is a projection of her inner self. Austere in black, white and gray, the only living color resides in the skin tones of the solitary woman who, seated in a chair, turns her head to look at the viewer with a direct self-possessed gaze. Her life alternates between the bedroom with its chaste coffin-like bed with its suggestion of death, and the living room with only a small token chair for furniture. However, the image in general does not affirm a condition of structured order and intellectual control: the shifting perspectives of the floors, walls and ceiling, the bed tilted to one side, and the curtains stirred by a stray wind insinuating itself into this hermetic existence suggest the fluid instability of the subterranean levels of the mind. But in all these, the female subject asserts her identity—her sanity, her integral consciousness—as she sits upright in front of a corner consisting of two panels, her head clearly defined against a vertical space of lighter tone and a hand resting lightly on her lap. Perhaps these panels are where she projects or conjures the protean images of her inner landscapes. But her sharp backward look shows that she is fully aware of the faintest intimation of an intruding presence, of the smallest rustling sound in her private chambers. She calls to mind the poetess Emily Dickinson, who wrote of the soul as choosing its society and then closing the door.

If the earlier portrait of the young woman with a rope is one part of this multilinear narrative, another painting, Inside Arnolfini’s Marriage, is also a piece of the narrative of rooms. As the interior of the triptych is a psychological space, so is the Arnolfini’s marriage chamber—and a cultural one as well. This work by Deborah Del-Pan is a clever deconstruction of the Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck’s celebrated painting Giovanni Arnolfini and his Bride (1434), which shows a couple exchanging marriage vows in the privacy of their household. But now the original painting is stripped of its solemnity and sacramental tone and, while much of the original setting is retained, it undergoes a reversal by becoming thoroughly secular, even carnal in tone. First of all, the couple who have changed positions are rid of their thick ceremonial robes, with the woman now completely nude and the man clad only in his checkered underwear.

Yet, in this intimate state of dishabille, they stand apart, turning away from each other: the woman is preoccupied with her image in a looking-glass, a sign of vanity as well as the concern to please (though not her husband), while he now makes a welcoming gesture to the bed—though not to her but to an implied male viewer (in fact, to the presences faintly espied in the circular mirror on the wall). He thus assumes the role of a pimp in the modern profane narrative. The image is also stripped of its original religious symbolism: the light is out in the single candle in the chandelier that symbolized God’s seeing eye; the little dog in the foreground which was a symbol of faithfulness has been replaced by a snarling cat in heat; the wooden sabots which were taken off out of respect for the holy ground of the sacrament are absent from the scene. All in all, the image evokes a feeling of irreversible spiritual loss accompanied by a sense of the surging profane energies of lucre and commodified lust. In relation to the Arnolfini deconstruction, the painting Interior is a lonely but courageous recuperation of the wholeness of being.

The second artist, Teresita Mapua, works in mixed media, including collage. She has worked in the line of appropriating known works in art history, among them Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Virgin with the Child Jesus and Saint John, Henri Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, and Caravaggio’s Medusa. Mapua very ably makes use of a large range of resources as she integrates sections of woodcarving, gold pigment, popular toys, plastic soldiers, computer parts, electrical wiring and calculators. A most interesting work is her appropriation of Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy. While this is not in the manner of a reversal as in Del-Pan’s approach to Van Eyck’s Arnolfini, the original Rousseau painting and its post-modern appropriation show a vast difference in spirit and aesthetic values. Rousseau evoked the magic of the universe, the secret and sacramental affinities of living creatures, such as the gypsy blissfully asleep with his mandolin and jug of wine, while a golden-maned lion sniffs at him within a vest but minimal landscape of sky with the moon above an ice-covered mountain range.

Now, in Mapua’s appropriation, the gypsy’s form consists of multicolored electrical wires, his face made up of electronic circuits. The lion has become a two-dimensional toy in brassy orange and yellow hues, while the moon has metamorphosed into a record in a record-player. Strewn beside the gypsy’s figure in place of the mandolin and the jug are cassette tapes and calculators. The original magic that the surrealist painting evoked has become transformed into technological wizardry in the music industry and the audiovisual media—a significant shift in aesthetic values. And we ask ourselves: Should we long for the original sleeping gypsy of our childhood and the magical lion who brought him musical dreams in the moonlit night? Or should we content ourselves to live with the reconfigured gypsy and lion with their remote control or click-and-play hi-tect wonders?

In another work by the same artist, Caravaggio goes pop as Medusa, with a ruddy, glowering face, shoots out a pack of stinging serpents. Here the artist uses the familiar toy snakes segmented to create movement. The theme of children and their toys is taken up in another work with the Madonna and Child as the central image. When in the past, children happily gamboled with baby animals, in our day they have developed the penchant for accumulating and collecting plastic toys such as soldiers in all the stances of combat that clutter the environment with nonbiodegradable material.

The third artist, Lily Avila Wuzela, makes sensitive, highly psychological portraits of women, as in I Am. In this splendid oil painting, a woman leans against the cropped figure of a man, but her face is half-concealed by an enormous red rose of velvety texture, symbol of full womanhood. Her eyes, however, are filled with pain; her expression is strained yet she sheds no tear. In other work, The Awakening, a young girl in the pose of a Rafaelesque angel muses on her future while a flaming red Lucifer stirs the wind in her immediate space.

Indeed, it will be worthwhile to follow the developments of these three excellent women artists who have come up with highly engrossing work.

Next Review:  "Three Women Reinvent Themselves"