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In faraway Norway, Jet Pascua’s art seems remote, his video, distant. But dwelling on the work "Just Write Them on the Water" (2006), a transliteration of the Filipino saying “Ilista Mo na Lang sa Tubig,” the gap between origin and migration, the tropical and the foreign, is crossed poignantly. And it is uncanny that the vehicle of this crossing is water and the aspiration to remember is textual. Well, almost .

We see a hand wielding a stick, going through the motions of inscribing something on the liquid surface, the marks never really being impressed on its fluid slate, seemingly just stirring and crumpling the placid reflection. What we see is this toil that is apparently not an instrument to any end, except perhaps to play as the rustle of the water permeates the scene, with varying energies and pressures, only to revert to stillness.

We learn that the hand is writing through the piece of crooked timber names of people who have died in another country, in the artist’s archipelago of so many islands. They are not ordinary folks who have passed on; they are martyrs to political causes refused by regimes paradoxically after the fall of the dictatorship in the eighties. It may appear banal and routinary, but with the title in mind, the gesture becomes a ritual of recollection, of recalling the past and committing it to memory, which is all flux, in the context of a current performance.

What inflects the melancholy is the weight of the Filipino passage. It speaks of forgetting, of not confronting issues and problems, of by extension denying justice to the grieving and the dispossessed. We therefore discern here indignation as the names are recovered and rewritten in futility, a romantic evocation of the disappeared through a deed that does not ensure appearance: a negation of a negation that is a productive failure.

Pascua’s passion seems to lie in the politics of inscription, the aesthetic of the graphic. In a previous exhibition of drawing, he spins the notion of repetition and discipline. In the said video project, he refers to the novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, to take us to Macondo where the village suffers from collective amnesia and has to nominate almost everything as if from tabula rasa. This garcimarquesian panic serves as foil to this film’ s deep disquiet, a testament of loss, absence, and dis-place. His other works betray affinity with this tedium-transcendence , such as Scratching the Surface (2008) in which he writes the word history on immaculate paper with a ballpoint pen over and over again until the tortured word recedes into a palimpsest of ink and in Vanishing Horizon (2008) in which he traces a line on a wall with a pencil and erases the trail at the same time, with delicacy and fury respectively.

For a place that forgets so easily, that is so taken by mystifications about freedom and it s heroes, this is radically sad, more acutely so if imagined from exile. There is repetition, surely, and very little change across the rivers and lakes and seas of the artist’s otherwise buoyant nation.

 

 

 

‘A Country Road. A Tree.’ by Jet Pascua
Opening Reception: March 17, Wednesday, 6-9pm
Show Dates: March 17- April 17, 2010
20Square at SLab | Silverlens Gallery

It’s been three years since Jet Pascua’s last solo exhibition in Manila. This March, he returns to the Philippine art scene, armed with perspectives enriched by global experiences – from his Fine Arts education and residency in Norway, to his numerous exhibitions in Oslo, Berlin, and his adopted hometown of Tromsø.

On his return, Pascua zeroes in on drawings, choosing to momentarily set aside his characteristic video and installation art. For his latest work, entitled A Country Road. A Tree, Pascua’s graphite drawings on wood (some of which with acrylic paint to ‘color’ the image), meets the classic play, Waiting for Godot.

Pascua’s drawings absorb the atmosphere of the play’s opening scene where two men wait at a country road, at a tree for someone called Godot. Unsure of everything else except the road with a tree, the two men wait mindlessly, endlessly. Like Samuel Beckett’s play, Pascua’s exhibit is about repetition and question. A Country Road. A Tree finds thematic symmetry with the two men’s decision to pass time by making nothing as something that needs to be done; thus finding themselves in a world that repeats itself. 

Pascua explains drawing as a kind of performance, “repeating a certain movement, a stroke, hundreds or thousands of times until a desired outcome is achieved”. Turning nothing (strokes) into something (image), however controlled, is also filled with questions of whether the cycle has an end. Does it end because the act has been achieved and the point made, or does it end because “ I am too tired to continue”, Pascua wonders.

Pascua’s life too mirrors this repetitive theme. Despite having lived in Norway for six years now, Pascua feels he is still on a journey, caught in a “virtual space of being neither here nor there”, still waiting to arrive at a supposed destination. And as if waiting for Godot himself, he wonders if he is “waiting for something that may not even come”. So while he waits, Pascua comes back to Manila, where his journey began, armed with his art- his country road, his tree – hoping that these are markers of his way forward.

Words by: Bea Davila