DOMINIC RUBIO’S MAYNILA
By: Reuben Ramas Cañete
To revisit the past in art is often to re-live and treasure that past. This occurs often to places that has much history embedded in them, and have undergone tremendous change that has erased this rich story in the present. The city and people of Manila is one such place. For three centuries, the city was Spain’s premiere colonial outpost in the Far East, where natives, Spaniards, and Chinese mixed their blood and lives to form the megalopolis - and the nation - we know today. The wrenching changes to its urban fabric brought about by the American occupation, the devastation of the Second World War and postwar reconstruction, has erased much of that history, preserved only in faded photographs, paintings, and bittersweet memories of elderly people.
This nostalgia for one’s erased past has become a magnet for many an artist who view Manila’s colonial imagery as a source of cultural diversity and a model for current aesthetic transformation. Dominic Rubio, a Paete, Laguna-based painter, is one such artist. In his new series of works titled Maynila (on view at the Art Center, SM Megamall, from August 6 to 20), Rubio’s forty paintings elicit that feeling of visual longing and comfort that one also sees in much of contemporary Asian art that revolves around the romantic story of the oriental city: the Singapore of M. Somerset Maugham, or the Hong Kong and Shanghai of prewar pulp novellas. 19th Century Manila, which is far older than these abovementioned cities, had its own epic chronicler in the person of no less than Jose Rizal, who in his two novels depicts with wistful prose the costumes, habits, and mindset of the colonial natives struggling to get by, or flourishing under international trade. This chronicle of that storied colonial city, on the other hand, found wistful expression under the pen of a more recent writer, the late National Artist Nick Joaquin, who wrote as much about its sorrowful Postwar fall as he reveled in its colonial glory days.
Rubio’s own painterly interpretation, however, is based not on a photographic reproduction of imagery, but in a conscious and calculated transformation of the colonial image that refuses the bonds of western imperialism. In other words, Rubio showcases the cultural variety and diversity of the urban denizens of "Old Asia," a catchphrase that concentrates on the strength of native life touched by colonial mores, but not subject to the servitude of its masters. In Rubio’s paintings, the mixed-blood citizens that stroll about casually in the colonial landscape hold their heads high, which are literally raised on tall, stick-like necks to emphasize native pride rather than subjection. Instead of political tension, what is highlighted in Rubio’s works is the lush visuality of colonial dress, manners, and "people types" that are best described as contemporary versions of the 19th Century tipos de pais, paintings that documented the various "kinds of people" that lived in the colony, and were popular collector’s items among international traders of the time. Thus, women go about dressed in the elegant and visually stunning ensemble of beige terno blouses, striped indigo tapis skirts, and ankle-length pleated undergowns. On the other hand, the men are dressed according to their profession or social status: camisas and short cotton trousers for Chinese mestizos; embroidered barongs, top hats, canes, and silk trousers for the native gobernadorcillos and hidalgos; or rolled-up camisas, trousers, and wide-brim hats for the paisantes and farmers.
Rubio’s use of these "people type" motif in his paintings is an attempt to relink the notion of national pride to its pre-modern roots, while at the same time, showing that such an identity was not contingent on just one race or social type. In Rubio’s paintings, all social classes and racial types mingle freely and unselfconsciously, greeting each other and carrying on the business of daily life in a city famed for its cultural diversity. The people who animate his landscapes do so either in the convention of the Hispanic Paseo or the Filipino pasyal, in which people all go about town in their Sunday finery; or are engaged in the mores of the day, such as the now-forgotten habit of chewing betelnut, or the more familiar scene of buying from the street vendor. The relatively oversized scaling of his figures in the foreground highlights these people as a perspectival exaggeration that simply continues the motif, and yet highlights the social aspect of this colonial visage in terms of contrasting details of costume and architectural structures. Thus, Rubio also anticipates the modernist complaint that he should not be "stuck in the past" by evoking a well-used device in Surrealism.
Dominic Rubio’s iconic usage of this colonial imagery, reformatted to address today’s urban issues of cultural monotony, identity drift, and racial/ethnic prejudice, has been consistent since his first solo show in 1999. His 2002 exhibition Balik Alaala that inaugurated Galerie Joaquin in San Juan had already stabilized this imagery, which has found international acceptance in his 2007 Noong Unang Panahon exhibition at Singapore’s Regent Hotel. In Maynila, Dominic Rubio not only masters this consistency, but concentrates it in the blank space of memory that has been irrevocably lobotomized from our collective national consciousness - the pride of urban citizens respecting one another, and harmoniously striving to maintain a city that we can all live in and fall in love with. |
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Old Asia (Manila 1884)
Oil on Canvas 32 x 54 in
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Binondo Theatre
Oil on Canvas 36 x 36 in
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Plaza Manila
Oil on Canvas 48 x 84 in
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Two Cultures
Oil on Canvas 30 x 24 in
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To The Market (Mother and Child)
Oil on Canvas 30 x 24 in
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Luluwas II ( To the City)
Oil on Canvas 30 x 24 in
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Mother and Child at the Market
Oil on Canvas 30 x 24 in
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Fruit Vendor
Oil on Canvas 30 x 24 in
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Rice Cake Vendor
Oil on Canvas 30 x 24 in
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Gentlemen and Ladies (Magkakaibigan)
Oil on Canvas 30 x 40 in
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