Added Aug 3, 2006
Perseverance under the most rigorous of demands characterizes both the work and life of visual artist Dennis ‘Sio’ Montera. The Cebuano’s artistic environment is rife with the intense competition between local artists and the constant need to survive the provincial art world, whose patronage is still dominated by traditional genre and the phenomenon of ‘imported’ (that is, Manila-based, mall-displayed) art. As a painting practitioner, Montera’s work alludes to a highly untraditional (because modernist) approach to this conundrum: a desire to utilize the sensuality of textural surface that defies local notions of representational effect, and instead focuses on the tactility of ground, pigment, and vehicle of new media, such as his current use of acrylic-based paint texturizers, and asphalt roof sealants.
As a Fine Arts graduate and current member of the faculty at UP College Cebu, from which he was awarded an academic fellowship grant to take his MFA in UP Diliman, Montera’s aesthetic affiliations bear close scrutiny: heir to the rich art educational heritage of the late Cebuano master and UP Fine Arts alumnus Martino Abellana (the Amorsolo of the South), Montera’s formal upbringing was both diverse and liberal, emphasizing the totality of the artistic experience not only from the retinal-naturalistic viewpoint, but also the cognitive-affective-expressionistic one. Abstraction provided for him an unprecedented opportunity to grow as an artist, although one who is still deeply imbedded in local cultural contexts, from which he teases out his ideational praxes into a mediation between pure form and ideological formation.
Its current resolution comes as no surprise. Penitensya is both a conceptual journey across space, as well as a formational journey heading inward. Composed of twenty panels measuring a total of six by eighty feet, the work is visually divided into three progressions composed of two major motifs. A central inner motif of vertical gestural lines formed from repeated layers of asphalt is overlain by more diagonal and concentric strokes of Versatex texturizer, while the top and bottom outer motif is composed of more planar pulls and ripples produced by working on the Versatex with a rag while still wet. The progression is formed by the gradual inversion of the tonal range between central and outer motifs from predominantly white, to gray, and finally to black. The monochromatic scheme of the work is seen as a solution to the opposition of figure-ground relations, utilizing contemporary materials that are painstakingly built up into this gesamkunstwerk that points to both its meditative effect in the formal elements involved (monochrome and gestural lines), as well as its synthesis of the dual origins from Western Minimalism and Asian calligraphy.
Montera avers to the concept of Lenten penitence as the unifying element of the work. Its application can be seen in his interpretation of the process of artistic production as an “act of seeking atonement for one’s sins.” Its execution on such a scale and theme is a manifestation on the self-inflicting of pain, and the expression of remorse for “sins” both real and imagined. In a sense, Montera also reinscribes his artistic labor as penitential, in the sense that it was an inflicting of ritualistic self-punishment in the act of fulfilling his vision, a process that is both strenuous and repetitive, occupying the better part of ten months. The theme of physical self-punishment in the Filipino folk practice of penitensya can be read as a mnemonic device that cues us to the ideal of self-denial in the face of remorse. It is, of course, one that is layered within a dense codifying praxis that webs regret, suffering, and redemption within an overarching paralogic of power relations. Prominent art critic Patrick Flores, for one, teases out the notion of suffering as a grammatical sign that appends the state of the penitent as that of “defensible survival,” that is, the felt struggle that is waged within the colonial economy of human spirituality versus imperial morality. Penitence becomes here a form not only of subservience, but also that of potential defiance, in the sense that its ultimate reward, liberation, is achievable through struggle and hardship. It is a Christian dialectic deeply imbedded in the Filipino folk imaginary, manifested in such disparate cultural forms as Bernardo Carpio and the Ninoy Aquino mystique. Flores, crucially, refashions suffering into “sufferance,” the act of suffering or the patience/endurance of suffering, as a qualifier in the “emotional economy of struggle that engages the suffering agent or…the sufferant to exceed the power by which it is enabled” (2003, 23).
Penitensya, therefore, slides between the spaces of abject surrender and its redemptive liberation through the conscious act of subjecting oneself to the struggle of suffering. Its role as homologous to the artist’s social stakes (the artist/work is subjected to surveillance, strenuous labor, and finally institutional acceptance) is central to the understanding of the project’s undertaking as an epic piece, literally in the abstract. Finally, its multi-valenced usage of monochrome gestural painting points sideways towards the cultural conventions of symbolic ritual: the colors of ash, coal, and sand that signifies the ends of materiality also serves to focus on the formality of elements, pared down to the single voice of its producer. The transition from tonal remorse to expressive realization is done by looking across from the formerly within, conceptually closing the composition as it ends from mostly white to mostly black—and resolving the act of epic sufferance with the hope for heroic redemption. **END**
*Reuben Ramas Cañete is a true blooded Cebuano and is currently an Asssistant Professor at the Department of Art Studies, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines at Diliman. He is an art historian, art critic, curator, and artist by profession. He won the 1996 Leo Benesa Award for Art Criticism, and served as president of the Art Association of the Philippines from 2000 – 2001.