The paradoxes in Ronnie Lazaro’s portraits

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

When an artist paints the portrait of a subject or a photographer shoots a close-up shot of a face, the intention is usually to capture the person’s visage, and in marking the nuances kept in the eyes, the smile, the frown, the tightlipped countenance, or the wrinkles spread throughout, reveal something about the persona behind the face — as if to suspend the candidly sincere moment through the immutable output of the brush or camera lens.

Not in Ronnie Lazaro’s portraits: in his photographs, one comes face-to-face with hand-clasped faces.

At a glance, his portraits offer a conundrum of hidden expressions. In Lies the Truth: Continues, Lazaro reiterates the duplicity of the illegible and its connotations in various contexts. Curated by Elvert Bañares, the exhibit takes its place among the art events of the 13th Bakunawa Fest, its iteration set in one of the quaintly cozy halls of the rejuvenated Jaro Municipal Hall, rechristened as Taohay under the auspices of the NCCA.

Set against the chamber’s walls painted in blazing orange are portrait shots, obscured by fingers choking out any recognizable aspect of the person. Thus concealment seems to counterflow ‘the hyper-vsibility, total exposure, and instantaneous consumption’ — a sanctuary of restraint, as the exhibit notes point out. But it is also quick to point out the deliberate aversion to revelation: the avoidant camera refrains from truth-telling but rather takes the more sedate role of moderator between hidden visages and the curious viewer. As aptly intended, the images settle between what is revealed and what is withheld. This liminality of uncertainty leaves space and agency for the viewers themselves to do the interpretative task of unmasking the faces and reconstructing the iconography.

The gallery of aspirant portraits present — or rather, conceal — a stellar cast of names from the film scene: Alessandra De Rossi, Nonie Buencamino, John Lloyd Cruz, Joel Torre, Agot Isidro, Audie Gemora, Jaime Fabregas, Bembol Rocco, Elijah Canlas, Gina Alajar, Cherry Pie Picache, among others — and as if to further ingrain a snide cameo, the artist himself. One would have searched for expressions of the human condition from the faces that helped shape our consciousness of Philippine cinema, and yet, we are left to further wonder and ponder their concealment.

Lazaro’s own comment about the first iteration of these portraits’ exhibition, gleaned from a Philippine Star article published last February, inserts itself amid the rows of covered faces. An elaboration of the title, it underlines rampant falsity accepted like truth — in government, politics, and of course, showbiz. One almost hears a chilling echo of a certain dictator’s wife who insisted that perception is real while the truth is not. Frighteningly, the covered faces become visual apotheoses of perception: while we see a resemblance of someone we consider familiar, we are likewise misdirected and distracted from their personas. As such, we are further left in a limbo of uncertainties.

Consequently, the perusal of the exhibition became a guessing game of identities and personalities. Truly yours and a companion spent a good part of an hour trying to uncover the owners of the faces from the wrinkles and accessories of their digits or the recession of their hairlines and the whiteness of these — and like a sinister blend of Clue and ‘Two Truths and a Lie’, we had to mentally pry away the fingers masking their visages. Exceeding the descriptive exercise of the visual, one subconsciously had to sift through the archaeology of blurred motives and intentions, and thus, eventually comes full circle to ask where truly lies the truth.

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In hindsight, there is a certain paradox with the exhibit’s location and of its pregnant imagery. In Hiligaynon, taohay (or its variant orthography táwhay) denotes tranquility, calm, or quiet comfort. But Ronnie Lazaro’s portraits are anything but. On the contrary, they perturb the viewer with the mystery of their maskings. In obscuring the obvious, they disturb us to ask the hard questions with the probably embarrassing answers which lay bare the falsities and fallacies surrounding ourselves, and perhaps, those we even espouse and guard. We look for some hint of these in the faces but irksomely, we are prevented from finding them.

Then again, are faces not masks themselves that hide our deepest and dimmest desires?

(The writer is a humanities teacher in one of the private schools of the city.)