12.13.05 art review

They're playing cards but its not a game

Lucilo “Jojo” Sagayno, turns 37 soon. Contrary to tradition, he is jumping the gun on us and is presenting us with his birthday gift. It is a gift that Sagayno is competent and all too willing to share.

This gift is a modest exhibit, “Ang Baraha sa Kinabuhi” (The Cards of Life) now on going at the Gamayng Gallery, Turtle's Nest Book Cafe.

The modesty of the exhibit is one only of scale or dimension because the growing maturity of Sagano's works betray a grasp after concerns beyond the merely personal towards a wider and more encompassing social art-view.

To be sure, as one enters the gallery, the work that greets the gaze is not modest at all. It is the title piece for the exhibit and one that is the original seed for the entire exhibit both in its technical elements and its conceptual framework.

This work, entitled,”Ang Baraha sa Kinabuhi,” is a stand-out. It is big, 6ft by 6ft. It was Sagayno's entry in the 1999 Phillip Morris Asean Art Awards art competition, a competition he has consistently participated in for the last 6 occasions and has made it into the semi-finals twice.

This work bears the hallmarks of Sagayno's art, which is composed of found objects, many of them detritus of everyday life. It is for this reason that the earliest descriptive applied to his art was “junk art,” to which he has counterposed his own descriptive,”recycled art.” He is also quick to add that the emphasis in his term is on the fact that he makes use of objects that has seen other uses and not the pejorative meaning of the term 'recycled' that, among artists, is commonly understood as repetitive.

Here the playing card makes its debut among the growing collection of Sagayno's recyclables that promises to be one with a wealth of its metaphorical possibilities. Yet, in this work, the cards, while providing the connotative superstructure of the work, is really relegated to the status of decorative accoutrement as the more dominant elements of the palo-palo or the washing stick, and even the bottle caps in the center, take up the entire visual and conceptual field.

Six years later, the playing cards return. But this time around, they participate more in producing the over-all intent and impact of the works, without, at the same time, denying its decorative underpinnings.

Of these, there are 14 in the exhibit. They measure either 53 x 26 cms and 44 x 29 cms in size providing the modest quality of the exhibit.

But the modesty stops there. More than half of the works are given to social commentary on the alarming levels of migration of professionals not only abroad, but even to professions that are considered lower in the scale of professional aptitude, from doctors to nurses, the most alarming example, which is resorted to to facilitate migration abroad.

Still, the commentaries are delivered in the usual tongue-in-cheek style Sagayno is known for. Yet this time this delivery is facilitated by another of Sagayno's strengths: experimentation.

The works here have a very print-graphic effect to them owing to Sagayno's development of a pigment using a mixture of commercial latex paint or commonly known as acrylic tinting color and a binder. This combination produces a paint with a gelatinous consistency.

This then is drawn onto a porous surface using another self-developed tool that relies on the syringe as the main applicator.

The result is embossed paint applied with the precision of a technical pen.

This then interacts with the ready-made images on, this time, playing cards of both the traditional four-suite deck and the more recent collecting cards from popular tv shows, pinoy big brother, etc. This interaction results in a most interesting collusion and collision of meanings that far from being confusing, clarifies Sagayno's road to maturity as he approaches mid-age.

The exhibit runs until January 23, 2006.