The Post-Warholite Brotherhood

 

Amirasolo and Other Essays                        

Part 3. In my Book                                           

Essay 29. THE POST-WARHOLITE BROTHERHOOD

An art movement flourished in England at around the same time as when the Impressionists were starving and struggling to gain acceptance in Paris. The three founding members, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais called their group the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to emphasize their fascination with medieval themes and painting techniques prior to the advent of Raphael.

The Pre-Raphaelites abhorred slapdash and bravura brushstrokes, and had a great success emulating the glazing technique and obsession with details of the quattrocento painters of the Flemish School. Although the Impressionists were considered more significant for their role in liberating painting from academism and tradition, the Pre-Raphaelites also had their own set of admirers from those who put premium on old-fashioned manual dexterity rather than innovativeness.

Pop Art made its first appearance in England in the late fifties. Richard Hamilton was its first proponent there. Although initially British, it was the Americans who managed to popularized Pop and gained for it a cult following, Andy Warhol especially. Who can forget Andy's large scale silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mao Tse Tung, car crashes, Campbell Soup cans, and electric chairs.

After the heyday of the other original American pop artists, like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichstenstein, and Keith Haring, along came Jean Michel Basquiat with his graffiti-like paintings, and Jeff Koons with his kitschy sculptures of Michael Jackson and his monkey among others, and his porn/art collaboration with erstwhile wife, pornstar Ilona Staller (La Ciciolina). There is also Robert Williams who effected a fusion of pop and surrealism with his pop surrealist works.

Lately, a reincarnation of sort of pop occurred in Japan with the rise to prominence of Takashi Murakami and his followers in the Superflat Movement. Their art can be the defining style of the past decade with its penchant for using anime, manga, and computer icons imagery.

In the Philippines, there are many painters who also does pop style paintings, like Ronaldo Ventura, Farley del Rosario, Anthony Palo, Dex Fernandez, Christian Tamondong, Jojo Garcia, Janos dela Cruz, Nemo Aguila, Ricarte Ico, Mura Hari Das Evangelista, and myself.

Beginning 2008, I began to wean myself away from the sharp-focused realist technique I used in my previous artworks. I sort of grew tired of that obsessive technique, and also felt that I have already exhausted all the possibilities of realism. I began looking at art with a modernist more sophisticated eye, seeing beauty in reduction and distortion.

The first products of my tentative foray into modernism were my appropriations of a few famous nudes by the old masters. A prime example would be the series I did on Titian's "Venus of Urbino", which I first painted as an obese Venus in the manner of Fernando Botero, but which I trimmed later into a slimmer though still voluptuous nude.

I didn't stopped there. I continue to subject my human figures to further manipulation and reduction. Now, the figures in my paintings, especially the female ones, are a bit cartoony and very slim, but are still seen as seductive, because of the overly emphasis on their hips and other feminine assets.

The unifying thread discernible in these later paintings, aside from my concern with themes of music, and courtship and seduction---a far cry from the angry and overtly political tones of the paintings of my youth---was my use of cubist and pop art devices like loud coloration, hard-edged lines, overlaps and tangents, geometric and textile patterns, and cartoony and kitschy images.

As with past and present pop artists elsewhere, our present crop of Filipino pop artists are fixated on images contemporary and popular. Jeepneys, sneakers, soda drink cans, toys, cartoons, graffiti doodles, rock stars, etc., are the staples of our art. With the proliferation of Warholite disciples in the Philippine art scene, it would seem that Andy hadn't died and is still busy directing his several assistants to manufacture the artworks for him to endorse and sign. If there was a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood before in England, there is now a Post-Warholite Brotherhood here. But the millennials among us might abhor the tag Post-Warholite. I suppose that they'd much rather call the movement, tongue-in-cheekily maybe, Pinoy Pop or Ppop.

#postwarholitebrotherhood