BEAUTY & UGLY RHYME
March 21, 2020 @ Altro Mondo Arte Contemporanea
There is a correlation between what is beauty and what is ugly, the fact that when we see something, we immediately decide if it belongs to the former or the latter. BEAUTY and UGLY RHYME is a verse taken from Marius Black's poem IMPERFECTIONS.
In the poem, he discusses divinity, one's own happiness, missed moments that we wish to forever keep in our memory, and dreams, written and fallen, on the streets of Manila. He discusses as well on the poem how we all see things from a different perspective, that overused notion that beauty is subjective. This show instead asks, "How can we see the beauty in things that other people deem ugly?"
Marius Black's response is not just words, but a body of works representing the daily life of Filipinos. Of finding beauty in one's battle for the right to live another day, of finding beauty as one sheds his own blood, sweat and tears daily so that one day, we can wake up and realize; Instead of just dreaming of comfort, we are already living a wonderful life if we know how to appreciate what we have.
Marius however, does not only focus on the beauty of the dream met or unmet. He also emphasizes on the beauty that is found
in the ugliness of one's struggles. He finds beauty in resilience, of not giving-up. That no one in this world doesn’t have struggles.
What makes us more appreciative of beauty is when we have truly witnessed the ugly.
The title was a double entendre not only exploring the real beauty of the Philippine street scenes of Manila not but it’s cleanliness but it’s own gritty character, the title also suggests that it has poetry involved with it. And so it did, as I wrote poems for each and every new artwork in this series. Exploring their stories of who the people I paint might be, as well as the feeling I felt upon seeing them. I did not interview them or asked permission to capture them or to know them, like a silent observer, I took their likeness and express who the people I see in the words I wrote about them.
The artworks in the gallery were accompanied by these poems, and that too did double duty, as it was in the middle of the pandemic where not even I the artist was able to go and visit when it opened. I was not there to tell the story of this or that artwork nor what the painting meant to me and why I decided to paint it. Instead there was a silent poem beside it, read it if you must to know something deeper about the piece. And it worked! For the people who visited Altro Mondo in the show’s duration, I was thrilled that the people who went really spent time to read them, even acting as a trigger for them to buy the artworks as they felt more connected to each piece as they would later tell me.
The staff of Altro Mondo also made sure that they did their best at the time to showcase my work online as they digitally recreated my show in a digital gallery. And I too did my best to promote the exhibit by reciting each poem I wrote and posting it online. We were all out of our comfort zones, especially someone like me who fears public speaking, recorded or not, but alas, we made it work. The show was a success and we all were able to resolve the obstacle creatively and even finding something new along the way that we can all use in future projects.
Case in point, my Beauty & Ugly Rhyme art & poetry book. The following is the book’s contents, which is the only way you can now read it as I’ve ceased it’s publication due to it’s enormous page count, we’re only self-publish at Kuro Saku in case you didn’t. However, don’t fret! As I’ve re-released the book in a more compact manner, leaving out the process and the story you just read, and retaining the meat of it all, the art and poetry.
