Framed: Mabini Art Project
Special project at Art Fair Philippines, 2016
"Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan | Antonio Calma
In the documentary to be exhibited alongside a motley of pictures for the art fair, Antonio Calma sits comfortably for the camera, posed against the fabled and majestic Mount Arayat. Calma is actually ensconced. After all, this is his social world, his art world. He is a painter of landscapes such as the one that frames him and one that he sells quite copiously in his trade. He is what back in the day would be called, oftentimes with condescension if not outright derision, a Mabini artist; in our own time, he persists to stand his ground, with his own gallery in Pampanga and Tarlac, a nest feathered by an atelier of artists and a cohort of loyal clients as well.
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan have earlier worked with Calma for an intriguing and in many ways difficult series on Mabini art, a fascination for eight years already. For the Aquilizans, the discourse around Mabini is a viable site from which to think about the circulation of art and the creation of its value from the origins of the market during the reign of Fernando Amorsolo in the first half of the twentieth century to present-day scenarios in which primary and secondary markets interact very briskly, sometimes vertiginously briskly. Mabini references a lot of logics vital to the commerce of art. It also implicates the afterlife of academic realism of the nineteenth century as a foundation of tourist and souvenir art in the American period. It relocates Amorsolo from a revered master seemingly beyond the machinations of money to a purveyor of taste and things in a wider economy of both kitsch and collectible. Finally, it complicates the notion of the contemporary itself. How do artists like the Aquilizans appropriate the lively practice and ecology of Calma in the context of contemporary art? Can Calma survive the translation, or is it only the Aquilizans who gain from this contentious gesture? Both Calma and the Aquilizans have been recognized because of this project: exhibition presence for the latter; and business prospects for the former. Can there be reciprocal mimicry here?
These questions are not masked in the exhibition. Rather, they are laid bare, the better for the public of the art fair to keenly revisit the questions of value and the social life of commodities. In previous collaboration with Calma, the Aquilizans radically intervened in the form of Calma's art. It was cut up, reframed, painted over, stacked up, made to look much more besides how it is supposed to appear in Mabini and its satellite retail outlets. In this fair, the Aquilizans decide to pursue another trajectory. They practically transplant the gallery of Calma from its homegrounds to the premises of the fair, set up as a gallery like any other at the event. Alongside it are iterations of the oeuvre of Calma, only that they are significantly mediated by the Aquilizans and that the discipline of art history encroaches to historicize it. This cohabitation is meant to confuse, to productively confuse, so that the idea of market and its political economy are viewed from a broader vantage and that the modernism of art does not elude the critique usually reserved for commercial interests enslaved by lucre. An argument can be made that it is commerce all over, just like the salon hang of the works in both the galleries of Calma and the Aquilizans. And if it is so, is there nothing outside it? Does inserting Calma into the art fair circuit merely indulge the market, or does it finally disabuse it?" (From the exhibition text)
Special project at Art Fair Philippines, 2016
"Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan | Antonio Calma
In the documentary to be exhibited alongside a motley of pictures for the art fair, Antonio Calma sits comfortably for the camera, posed against the fabled and majestic Mount Arayat. Calma is actually ensconced. After all, this is his social world, his art world. He is a painter of landscapes such as the one that frames him and one that he sells quite copiously in his trade. He is what back in the day would be called, oftentimes with condescension if not outright derision, a Mabini artist; in our own time, he persists to stand his ground, with his own gallery in Pampanga and Tarlac, a nest feathered by an atelier of artists and a cohort of loyal clients as well.
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan have earlier worked with Calma for an intriguing and in many ways difficult series on Mabini art, a fascination for eight years already. For the Aquilizans, the discourse around Mabini is a viable site from which to think about the circulation of art and the creation of its value from the origins of the market during the reign of Fernando Amorsolo in the first half of the twentieth century to present-day scenarios in which primary and secondary markets interact very briskly, sometimes vertiginously briskly. Mabini references a lot of logics vital to the commerce of art. It also implicates the afterlife of academic realism of the nineteenth century as a foundation of tourist and souvenir art in the American period. It relocates Amorsolo from a revered master seemingly beyond the machinations of money to a purveyor of taste and things in a wider economy of both kitsch and collectible. Finally, it complicates the notion of the contemporary itself. How do artists like the Aquilizans appropriate the lively practice and ecology of Calma in the context of contemporary art? Can Calma survive the translation, or is it only the Aquilizans who gain from this contentious gesture? Both Calma and the Aquilizans have been recognized because of this project: exhibition presence for the latter; and business prospects for the former. Can there be reciprocal mimicry here?
These questions are not masked in the exhibition. Rather, they are laid bare, the better for the public of the art fair to keenly revisit the questions of value and the social life of commodities. In previous collaboration with Calma, the Aquilizans radically intervened in the form of Calma's art. It was cut up, reframed, painted over, stacked up, made to look much more besides how it is supposed to appear in Mabini and its satellite retail outlets. In this fair, the Aquilizans decide to pursue another trajectory. They practically transplant the gallery of Calma from its homegrounds to the premises of the fair, set up as a gallery like any other at the event. Alongside it are iterations of the oeuvre of Calma, only that they are significantly mediated by the Aquilizans and that the discipline of art history encroaches to historicize it. This cohabitation is meant to confuse, to productively confuse, so that the idea of market and its political economy are viewed from a broader vantage and that the modernism of art does not elude the critique usually reserved for commercial interests enslaved by lucre. An argument can be made that it is commerce all over, just like the salon hang of the works in both the galleries of Calma and the Aquilizans. And if it is so, is there nothing outside it? Does inserting Calma into the art fair circuit merely indulge the market, or does it finally disabuse it?" (From the exhibition text)