Monday, August 9th, 2010
a version of this is in the Arts and Books Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 9 2010.
From afar, the first thing you notice about Ruben de Jesus’ works is its colors. Reds, blues and blacks are rendered in various and unexpected hues that play around with light and shadow and emphasis. Up close, each of the pen and ink works is a story in itself, at the same time that all together they could be bound into one children’s storybook. Simpleng Buhay, Simpleng Kulay (The Alcove, Filipinas Heritage Library, Makati Avenue) seems simple enough in theory, but in reality it speaks of a complexity that’s in the artwork, and more importantly is beyond it.
The choice of the simple
Last year, de Jesus mentioned the idea of paintings on the simple life to Filipinas Heritage, and while they were excited about it, de Jesus needed to be given much space and time to do it. Sometimes it wasn’t clear how much of the work was being done, or even how many artworks there were going to be. But a year after, there are 12 framed artworks all in all, six in blue and black and six in red and black, each one working with a particular moment in rural life that might be deemed simple, if not forgotten, maybe a reminiscence, by current standards of city life and development. (more…)
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 14 2010.
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil’s first books of poems has many things going against it, including the fact that it is poetry and that it is in English, both of which limit it to a particular audience. More importantly, it comes at a time when the kind of Philippine poetry in English that’s celebrated – if publication and recent award-winning collections are any indication – has been about going beyond the person and the personal in the poem, almost a poem-for-and-of-the-world, where the nation is missed/missing/ disappeared, the text existing beyond the page and into a realm of learnedness and influences that it requires the reader to inhabit. This, at a time when people continue to think poetry too difficult, and Filipino poetry too removed from the conditions that are real to us. In this sense, the debate has become too simple: the easy/ confessional/personal poem, or the difficult/conceptual/landless poem?
The Highest Hiding Place (Ateneo de Manila Press, 2009) by Ypil lands right smack in the middle of this debate, not falling clearly on either side of it. There is a refusal to be easily about personal confessions here, even as these poems seem to refuse difficulty. It experiments with forms, yes, and necessarily does with content too, but it does both without refusing the reader entry into the poem. (more…)