Our times, as told through Jun-Jun Duarte’s entwined realities

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

The damp evening of October 2 witnessed a lean opening of Jun-Jun Duarte’s newest exhibit at Museo Iloilo. The artist’s sixth solo brought back to the spotlight the social realism associated with his mixed media art. It held a curious title: ‘NoNeDoCo’, an acronymy of a string of phrases — Now Showing, Next Picture, Double With, Coming Soon — as if our realities were an overly hyped cinematic hit that made a blockbuster appearance in an instance and then faded to the shelves of memory.

Duarte’s abstractions concocted out of mixed media is something personal to him, the style surfacing time and again in his previous works. Observed from afar, there is an underlying impressionist layer to his art, with surreal evocations from elements and objects spread across it; the recurrent strands of yarn and twine are still there. There are no straightforward commentaries in his works; his social realism is enigmatic to the fleeting eye and provocative to the observant mind. It demands the viewer to pause and peruse.

In NoNeDoCo, Duarte’s visual commentaries once again make themselves felt, inviting the viewer to look closely.

His abstracted bricolages become all too symbolic. The ideas of power and peace are put together through the shattering of lexis and letters, juxtaposed with images and artifacts of pop culture. Even religiosity is subsumed by contemporary taste and projected through images as social currency. This visual sublimation of social currency likewise touches on education and foreign labor, where both are seen as avenues to, if not actual forms of power. Distinctive to the eye would be the academic medallions surrounded by marginalia and the paper boats coasting around a blurry map of the country; connecting and framing these details are yarn and twine.

Easily perceived in the gestalt of these images are the social ills we collectively face: corruption, greed, the deterioration of our social institutions, the issues in our labor force, the stratification of social hierarchies. The entwined (literal in this sense) images and objects coalesce into statements of fracturing, highlighting what divides us yet also what keeps us together — very much akin to the strands which seem to separate yet also connect. For instance, in ‘Kapatid sa Kapatid, Laman sa Laman’, Duarte depicts polarized regionalist sensibilities and tensions by metaphorising these through plastic figures of soldiers painted with the national colors. While arranged to be seen in conflict with each other, twine also paradoxically ties some of them in a fixed lock-hold. Zooming out to a more global take, his ‘Dumber Games’ maps out the absurd hegemonic relationships between states and ideologies, the shadows of armaments as a number game in the background, a snide yet menacing remark about the follies of armed conflict.

As if to provide a visual antidote to these sordid propositions, Duarte offers a train of minimalist assemblage in his Panagang series. Within the frames, amulets, medallions, scapularies, statuettes, estampitas, and anting-anting become centerpieces set against vivid splashes of color; strands of yarn are strung across the breadth of the frames. The emphases on these items evoke nuances of belief and spirituality, incorporating folkloric practice and Catholic imagery. The spotlight on the anting-anting poses the question of what is being shielded and from what: are the talismans meant to hold back the tide of time and the reaving swells that flow with it?

For time itself becomes a subject of scrutiny in Duarte’s works. It is portrayed both subliminally and implicitly, as if to point out the ephemerality of a concept that permeates us all. In a sense, it becomes an amplifier to the commentary. This is especially seen in his Lipas Oras, Lipas Gutom, Lipas Panahon and Agwantista, where calendar sheets are loudly and ominously embedded at the background, underlining the idea that the flow through hours and days moves us through our drudgeries and chances — something stays, something gets lost. Overlaid on these are stencils, scribblings, pastiches, odds and ends, and the ever-crisscrossing strands of twine stretched in web-like geometries. Here is Time the Devourer, and all are consumed in its gaping maws.

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At the latter part of that evening, there was a segment of performance art which this writer missed. The posted photos and videos over social media showed the artist attired in academic garb with a helmet perched on his head. He led another helmeted performer in tow; others enacted sundry and spontaneous scenes of youth at leisure and at play, oblivious to the oddly garbed pair of roped figures traipsing through the artworks. If the dramatics were meant to remark about juvenile joys that pass too quickly and too dearly, then the spiel held a performative mirror to what was displayed on the walls. In Duarte’s new exhibit, life becomes a cinematic reel of tragedies, comedies, and all the gray characters in between.

(The writer is a humanities teacher in one of the private schools of the city. The photos are by Arnold Almacen.)