A world just like ours, only magnified
In the painting “Fliofea, Catalina, Erlinda at Aurea,” three old women candidly sit on a wooden bench, as if waiting for a photo-op. Everything seems to be normal and ordinary except for the deer horns screwed onto their foreheads, jutting out of the picture plane. Upon closer inspection, their skin is stippled with the veined underside of leaves. Are these women inhabitants of an otherworldly place or are they actual people, trying to pass off as entities of the natural world?
Such ambiguity is replete in the recent works of Geraldine Javier in her latest exhibition, “Landscape as a State of Mind is Landscape,” on view at the Finale Art File ( finaleartfile.com) until May 30. Here, the landscape — the world — she has fashioned, as the title suggests, should be taken at its face value, not some fugitive realm beyond the reach of human understanding.
Javier’s world, just like our own, is alive and pulsing with life, ravages of mortality, rot, except that these qualities get magnified in a flurry of exhilarating growth, intense coloration and explosive forms. While we were confronted, in her previous exhibits, with languorous snatches of scenery steeped with the faint shadow of nightmares of which Javier is famous for, in this show, light — and by extension, color — asserts its omnipresence, throwing girls in florals, petals and their stamens, an old man in a pair of blue shorts into stark relief against their surroundings, insistent in disclosing brief manifestations of beauty and ultimate decay. With their deep, incalculable bleeds, washes and hues, encaustic and ink have played well to Javier’s aims.
This prodigiousness is echoed by the gallery itself, with a cavernous interior composed of three sections ( Tall and Upstairs Galleries and Video Room), that seems to be the perfect staging ground for Javier’s version of nature’s exuberant encroachments. Here, no square meter of floor and wall areas is spared, as Finale Art File teems with paintings, vitrines, mixed media art and, in the Video Room, the charred remains of a log that constitute an installation: black, unmovable solids that seem accusatory of their fate. Even the actual bodies of insects have found their resting place in some of the works: the unfolded translucent wings of a moth, the jewel-like carapace of a beetle.
A balancing, if not a tempering, act is introduced by the alltoo-recognizable human elements of decoration — from the frames and their geometric patterns, to the embroidery, to the tatting, down to the instances of carpentry that run across some of the works. The suite of works titled “Clockwork Orange,” which captures stills from the eponymous dystopian film, is accomplished through painstaking needlework.
For someone who has the standing and reputation of Geraldine Javier, staging a new exhibition comes with great expectations. What new feat, what shift in style, what development of vision will the artist exhibit this time? What freshly minted psychological imprints will she reveal through symbolism? How will this show connect to, depart from and ultimately triumph over her previous shows?
Rather than coming up with something radically different of what we know as her supreme gifts, Javier seems to have nourished her arsenal of imagery with the spirit of place, in her case the rural environs of Cuenca, Batangas, where she is currently based. Rather than an expansion, what we see in “Landscape as a State of Mind is Landscape” is a resplendent distillation of the elementary particles that constitute her visual philosophy: the haunting, forlorn shapes of the natural world in its various states of transformation and her mysterious figures. Homing in on the traditional genres ( still life, landscape and portraiture) expressed in different media, Javier’s works discharge in searing flashes her terrifying and redemptive vision.