by Cid Reyes
“One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the
fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord –
the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream
passing through nature. It seemed to me that I heard a scream. I painted this
picture, painted the clouds in actual blood. The color shrieked. This became
“The Scream.”
Regarded as “an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time, “The Scream” was painted by the Norwegian artist Edward Munch in between 1893 and 1910. It has become a symbol of modern man’s suffering and pain. It was even used as the cover of the landmark book “The Primal Scream.”
In a brilliant stroke of reference to contemporary technology, alluding to the coping mechanism of man desperate to turn off the ceaseless noise of the world and its distractions, Rey Aurelio bestows his recent works with the collective title “Silent Mode.” By his own admission, the works are a direct reflection of the artist’s own personal struggles and his way of dealing with his own private pain. It is through the privacy of and solitude of his art that he is able to find peace and solace within himself.
Interestingly, Munch’s “Scream” is also known as “The Cry,” thus evocative of a spirit’s lament and desperation. In an outburst of intense sorrow or anger, an individual gives vent to his emotions. Aurelio, on the other hand, reins in his feelings as expressed by his figures, trapped within themselves. Thus in his “Shout” series, the visages are hooded, but through the strained folds of enshrouding cloth, the viewer can glean the emotionally wracked figures.
In execution, Aurelio can be described as hyper-realistic in the classical vein. Like life studies, the figures are rendered in the full glory of their musculature, always in a state of tension, straining against an impelling force. In the appropriately titled “Exhausted” series, the half-naked figures seem gripped to their breaking point. Here the artist excels in the art of chiaroscuro – Italian for light-dark – transforming skin and flesh gleaming with light from out of the shadows. From the two-dimensional art of painting, Aurelio achieves the illusion of a three-dimensional form. With such skillful draughtsmanship, he can convey the reality of the human body without taking recourse to color. Indeed, the human skin seems more alive and truly fleshed-out.
Indeed, the artist seems to mold the bodies into studies in volume. Moreover, the so-called “Mold” series are fragments of torso, arms, and hands, inevitably recalling ancient Greek statuary, in poses that allude to certain figures, with their arched backs heaving muscles, in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Intriguingly, the image of a drooping flayed skin, such as that in the Renaissance master’s work where his own face appears, seems echoed in some of Aurelio’s works.
Flesh assumes the illusion of stone or marble. In so doing, Aurelio transports his works to another dimension, making us aware that the human body is a landscape of light and shadows, with its own rhythm of muscular convulsion.
Digressing from his reflections on the human physiognomy, the artist creates the still life “Cold Compress” which features a carabao skull and horn topped ludicrously with an ice cap. He uses the carabao as a symbol of strength, capable of outrage and violence whose temper needs to be tamed. The image is at once disconcerting and humorous, commanding attention by the disparity between bristling beast and the connotations of an ice cap: extreme cold and steaming heat allaying each other to arrive at calm and tranquility. The still life is Aurelio’s metaphor for human behavior which he himself has observed in his own experience.
A large work which the artist titled “Driver’s Seat” is a panorama of characters that are best described as shady, both in the literal and figurative sense. It is Aurelio’s expose of the culture of corruption that seems to have pervaded the moral fiber and seeped through the very skin, now porous with greed and avarice, twisting the values which we once upheld. The work condemns the power play that leaves our people at the mercy of those in position and with stature. To the artist’s credit, the presentation is far from being didactic, and while it moralizes, the stance of the figures partake of a neo-classical fervor. Subjugating those we may consider beneath us is itself a sly and sinister species of torture that we inflict on our fellowmen.
Thus, torture – both physical and spiritual – is the ultimate violation. In a sense, torture is worse than murder, which can be instant and, in some ways, “painless.” The sudden-ness, the unexpectedness of the violation, catching the victim unaware, may itself even be an art of mercy. In his works that depict torture and torment, Aurelio reproduces a kind of brutal beauty. The experience is intensified by the stifling of the scream – existence in “silent mode” – that denies the victim the release and the acknowledgement of his pain.
Like the classic philosophical question – “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” – the absence of sound, the supremacy of silence, the denial of occurrence, reduces the victim into non-existence. The annihilation of the self – the obliteration of the individual - is final.
Rey Aurelio chooses a quotation which could be an epitaph for his nameless victims: Within each of us is a silence, a silence as vast as the universe, and when we experience that silence, we remember who we are. (Suzanne Williams)
Even in silent mode, Rey Aurelio’s outrage reverberates, making explicit his feelings about in human suffering, fortuitously in an eruption of artworks that can better speak for themselves.
Cid Reyes is the author of coffee table books on National Artists
Arturo Luz, Bencab, J. Elizalde Navarro and Napoleon Abueva. He is
co-author of the recently published book on esteemed artist Romulo
Olazo.