About faces: Nona Garcia’s ‘After Artists’ exhibit

Being nearsighted, I’ve experienced tapping the back of the shoulders of strangers who I thought were friends.

During the opening of the exhibit of Nona Garcia at the Victor Oteyza Community Art Space (VOCAS) last August 16, the child of one of the artists called on “Tito Kaw! Tito Kaw” at one of the 15 portraits exhibited there. Never mind that Tito Kaw or Kawayan de Guia was exhibited shorter than he really was and the black floral shirt he was wearing was almost worn out.

Nona Garcia, in her first one-woman exhibit in Baguio, presented “After Artists” composed of 14 artists who inspired, taught, or studied with her. 

They are Robert Chabet, Kidlat Tahimik, Bencab, Alfredo Aquilizan, Kawayan de Guia, Louie Cordero, Patty Eustaquio, MM Yu, Geraldine Javier, Yasmin Sison-Ching, Poklong Anading, Jojo Legaspi, Maria Taniguchi and Gary Ross Pastrana. 

They were “back portraits” done in oil on canvas paper. They are facing a white wall, which could mean many things – a blank canvas, the white sheet of colonialist photographer Dean Worcester, or even Gabriel Garcia’s firing squad wall. Nona Garcia had been doing “back portraits” in the past. She did a pair for her parents. She also did a series of back paintings of a girl as she grew up every two years. Nona even did a back portrait of actor John Lloyd Cruz who attended the opening last Friday.

The 14 paintings were done almost monochromatically, but Nona’s punctilious attention to detail makes them beyond photographic. Patty’s white linen blouse, for example, was not painted as plain white. You can see the creases and the stitches. You can follow the white hairs of the subjects from the roots to the ends. When you turn around the faces, you can’t see the common signifiers like facial expressions.

When you remove the background, you are forced to concentrate on their clothes, the bumps on the skin, the earlobes, and the top end of the cervical vertebrae. Nona Garcia is a very reserved person who doesn’t even have a Facebook account. Hakaw, her pet pig, has far more followers on Instagram than her. Painting her subjects from the back reflects her reticence and her playfulness.

By naming her show, “After Artists,” she is looking behind them as a kind of homage. Even the subjects are looking at the part of themselves which they hardly saw. The subjects mailed their pictures instead of posing for them, except for Chabet, a legendary UP Fine Arts teacher who was long dead. Nona said that she had to work on one portrait for about a week each. BenCab had him wearing a camouflage vest but he can’t really disappear in them. The way he folded his arms made him familiar to friends.

Kidlat submitted a photo when his hair was still in dreads. Those were cut when he recently went to Tibet but then who can’t mistake Kidlat Tahimik with his unique wardrobe? For some of those unfamiliar with the other artists, they have to contend with the icon or the archetype.

Nona upped the guessing game by not identifying who posed for those paintings in front of them. They are forced to look for verbal clues (the Rat Fink T-shirt can only be Louie and the floral black shirt could be someone Chinese) or Google for their faces. And then they become familiar with their work as well.

As such, the viewer is forced to gaze longer and hope the artists will look back at them. – Rappler.com

‘After Artists’ will be at the VOCAS Gallery at Session Road until the end of September.