Lourd de Veyra’s crossover edgework
If one Googles this fellow who continues to add multiple hats besides his usual beret, what is initially provided by Wiki is the following: “Lourd Ernest Hanopol de Veyra is a Filipino musician, emcee, poet, journalist, TV host, broadcast personality and activist who became famous as the vocalist of the Manila-based jazz rock band Radioactive Sago Project.”
An update of this bionote should now add that he has also drawn attention to his skills as a visual artist, no matter how he concedes that his recent productivity in that field is simply an antidote against boredom, and not yet inclusive of painting on canvas.
Over two years ago, Lourd de Veyra was invited to showcase his output as an IG doodler at Gerry Tan’s Golden Cargo gallery, which displayed the A4-sized drawings in a tiny space in a bank safety deposit box.
The 12 drawings constituted his first one-man show, from Jan. 1-15, 2021. He then joined a group show billed as “Sapience” at the Modeka Art Gallery in Makati, where the invited artists were each given canvases of 20 x 20 inches for their individual takes on the significance of the year 2020.
When I last interviewed him at around that time, Lourd was typically self-deprecating:
“(My) fundamental market is an audience of one—myself, creator and viewer, which is to say, uncritical, unschooled, the visual-art equivalent of poetaster. Of late, I’m enjoying bigger and bigger drawings. As in wall-size works as high as seven feet. And why not? I’m enjoying this sh*t. I still think they’re crappy, though, and I don’t really care.”
Last Friday, Feb. 10, Lourd opened a one-man show at Gravity Art Space in Diliman, Quezon City—titled “PURO DROWING NAMAN ’TO EH.”
Paolo Enrico Melendez writes that it “happens at an interesting time for Drawing. On the one hand, its practice has been enjoying a rise in academic attention and critical cred.”
He quotes American visual artist and scholar Janet McKenzie: “Drawing reveals the subtlest movement, the most clinical analysis, the most precise drama. Modern drawing gives room for alternative reactions…”
Melendez adds: “Locally, drawing’s mainstream popularity likewise points to a solid relevance. Tarantadong Kalbo’s visual intimations have an immediacy of expression and connection that illustrates McKenzie’s point, and therefore often go viral… On the flipside, ‘Drawing’ in its noun form continues to be deployed derisively in the Filipino idiom. And at least in art tutorials it is still considered as merely the first step—baby’s first barf of expression—with ‘Painterly’ being the adjectival goal, the toga and tassel of art practice. These healthy tensions provide a lot of torsion for the upward socio-cultural punch, of which de Veyra is likely our most savvy practitioner.”
Savvy indeed. I’d say that Lourd’s punch (or what may be likened to a TikTok series of FPJ’s blows) is sourced to brimming creativity. Whether you call him a Renaissance man or a crossover dilettante, his expressive output has always been edgy, ever on the brink to challenge tropes turned clichés, veering towards the unusual and original.
He has tweaked history as he has jazz/rock music. As an activist, he does a braveheart jig as a mockumentarist, at the risk of earning the ire of BBM adherents, to the point of reportedly getting death threats for merienda.
No poet-taster, this guy, who has claimed Palanca and Philippines Graphic literary awards and authored 10 books, including a novel and several poetry collections. He’s on the precipice for the long haul, hopscotching through music, reportage, political commentary, creative writing and visual art—welding and wielding them all together as a surveillance balloon of many intriguing parts.
Going through some of his latest drawings, I have to commend Melendez on his all-weather eye when he comments that “whereas the previous works were largely waking monochromatic visions of lockdowns and disease, this show reflects on a renewed state of becoming. De Veyra lets fall black dye on fields of red acrylic in Drawing’s characteristic indifference to layers and analogy; the flatness does not make the images less intricate, rather, it imbues them with razor velocity.”
I also see how De Veyra’s poetry is translated into the graphic metaphors drawn on paper, as with some of his poems in his last book, Marka Demonyo Or Poems on Love, Faith, and Duct Tape:
From “The Angel of Death Wears a Motorcycle Helmet”: “Bright red. Chinese-made,/ with decals of obscure racing brands./ He also wears camouflage cargo shorts/ and an obviously counterfeit No Fear shirt,/ and while terribly oversized,/ unable to mask his paunch./ Though I must say we share the same tastes/ in rubber slippers, cheap, plastic, and chunky./ He’ll be the last person I’ll ever see in this life/ and I can’t even see his eyes …”
From “Ostinato with Exit Wounds”: “In our language,/ Any word uttered twice/ Obliterates all sense of gravity:/ Sayaw-sayaw, Jesus-Jesus,/ Ulan-ulan, dios-dios// As if a reappearance, a refrain/ Of syllables, like a ghostly coda,/ In a tentative moment,/ And in between two words,/ A brief nihilistic pause,// An incantation of bird wings,/ The gentle violence inflicted on sense and syllable/ Rises to an imponderable degree.// Like a Christ multiplied by itself/ Would negate the Christness of both…”
Why, these can also be turned into music. Or maybe that’s where they came from.
National Artist Gémino H. Abad’s blurb for the same book states that De Veyra’s poetry as theater “evokes a compelling ‘out-raging’ sense of our troubled times coming to grips with dire poverty, despotic governance, carnage, duplicity, and subservience to foreign imperialism…”
Poetry as theater—with a “gentle violence inflicted on sense and syllable.” The imponderable degrees to which Lourd de Veyra’s edgework rises can always be trusted to multiply by themselves.