Juanito Torres on our new reality
DRIVING on a rainy afternoon on a literal skyway for flying cars, another airborne vehicle almost hit them head on. “What the hell was that?” a ruffled Marty Mcfly asked. “Taxicab,” said Dr. Emmett Brown. Back to the Future Part II captured the imagination of viewers with an outlandish take on what society would look like in 30 years. Director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale presented a technologically advanced world, one that the film’s stars found themselves in after departing 1985 on a fiery trail aboard the Delorean time machine.
“Where are we?” said Marty, after composing himself following the near mid-air car crash. He then rephrased the question: “When are we?”
Doc told him that it was October 21, 2015. That date, which once seemed impossibly distant, was five years ago last week.
Introduced in the 1989 classic movie were a number of odd concepts and occurrences, from flying cars to bionic brain implants to the sustained prevalence of payphones and newspapers. But somehow, even half a decade after since the film’s setting, every single idea it advanced has failed to match the peculiarity of how the real future has unfolded, culminating in this truly bizarre, plagueinflicted present.
In The New Reality: Truth is Stranger Than Fiction, painter Juanito Torres visualizes life that has indeed become more ludicrous than imagined worlds.
“We are presenting Juanito’s take on current history,” said Jack Teotico, Galerie Joaquin managing director. “The Covid pandemic is history unfolding, and Juanito is able to capture that with his very compelling, artistic and creative take on the situation.”
Torres draws from his vast experience as a historian. He has worked at different museums in Batangas, Ilocos Norte and San Juan City. His artworks are informed by prominent events and faces from Philippine history, interpreted in distinct surrealism.
For his ongoing solo show at Galerie Joaquin, the artist depicts everyday activities performed by characters donning gas masks. In Museum, New Normal, Torres’s dramatic use of lighting brings to life a scene composed of a sculpture and a painting that are being viewed by a masked crowd. Meanwhile, a pair escapes into an empty movie theater with popcorn in hand in Enjoying the Cinema.
Aside from interpreting familiar activities with the characters of today, Torres also presents classic Filipino heroes, including Andres Bonifacio, as their modern, medical counterparts.
In Darating din ang Bagong Umaga, the Father of the Philippine Revolution replicates Saint Michael. Bonifacio is shown wearing a doctor’s coat, standing valiantly over the devil with a coronavirus head, about to get stabbed by the Rod of Asclepius.
“Gumagamit pa rin ako ng mga heroes para mas makilala pa natin sila,” Torres said. “Ang works na ito, magpapaalala na ang Filipinos ay kayang magtulongtulong.”
The New Reality: Truth is Stranger Than Fiction runs until October 31.