Contra mundum: The many worlds of Marzz Capanang at ILOMOCA

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Last July 18 witnessed the vernissage of Marzz Capanang’s 6^th solo show at the Hulot Gallery of Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art. Entitled ‘Mga Kalibutan’ (Realms), the exhibit festooned the walls of the gallery with painted and assembled circles and discs, filled by sundry and vivid images which reveal, in the words of co-curator and exhibit writer Kristine Buenavista, the artist’s reverent wandering and meditation on the ‘sacredness and the vulnerable, brave breath of co-existence, interdependence, and belonging.’

Braving the dismal weather and the sporadic showers of that afternoon, art enthusiasts flocked to the museum to indulge in the many-orbed display that speaks so much of Capanang’s artistic traverse and coming of age. Like a ship’s portholes, they lent the audience a glimpse into the many worlds navigated by the artist: in Capanang’s Realms, there are vestiges of the nostalgic and the phantasmagorical, the poetic and the idealistic, the shared and the personal.

Beyond mere imagery, the circles of art – both abstract and representational – offer a metaphysical lens through which the singularity of World-ness is put into question and a multiverse of possibilities and imaginings is offered as alternative. The exhibit notes enumerate these abstractions eloquently. “An unspoken language of kinship… a yearning for home… a circle of eccentrics… a constellation of care… a collective of shapeshifters… birds in murmuration…” In the autumnal colors, in the cold greyness, in the cool azure shades, in the golden swathes and curves of paint are the many abstract realms formed out – and formative – of Capanang’s worldview, context, and identity as artist and aesthete.

But beyond a transcendent understanding of worlds, words play a vital role in Capanang’s art. For one, the juxtapositions and paradoxes of his artworks’ titles invite the viewer to ponder further his inspirations. In his art, a forest is reinterpreted as a geometric assemblage of wooden dowels and mouldings; while the word kagulángan resonates with the arcane antiquity of the untamed jungle, the artificiality of treated wood arranged in stiff, quaint layers and punctuated with wooden novelties ascribes to a formality contradicting the title’s purported meaning. In another assemblage, Capanang reinterprets the idea of lulling a child to sleep – ilí-íli – with a pastiche composed of dried flowers that once graced his deceased mother’s wake, a persistent visual eulogium of maternal instincts and sentimentalities, echoing continuously through this memento mori elevated as art.

Kristine Buenavista’s poetry inscribed in one of these circles seems to underline further this playful interaction of the visual with the poetic. Set against lacings and scribbles of ochre, scarlet, and brown, the Hiligaynon verses of yearning and passion intersperse with metaphors of time and nature, achieving an ekphratic iconograph of sorts, representing the best of both aesthetic realms.

Worlds apart from ideological circles that champion streamlined conformity and stolid uniformity, Capanang’s artworks resolutely stand up as a fresh outburst and celebration of joie de vivre – the many-hued splendors and spectrums of life which reverently commemorate existence and death, happiness and sorrow. In his Realms are spheres of wonderment and bewilderment – something not usually encountered in the mundanity of everyday, something that goes against the grain of the ordinary and the usual, and probably something which writer and critic Nick Joaquin would have approvingly and aptly described as contra mundum. On that note, we concur.

(The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools in the city. The photos are from Shas Hobilla; the poster is from the museum.)