The lost art of the album cover
Growing up off campus in a decade not even your grandkids will remember, there was once a graphic book-bound collection of album covers from diverse rock albums, the likes of which have become a rarity in the age of digital downloads. Not that it matters much, but there seems to be truth that just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, neither should you judge a music album, because the available visuals could give you a fair hint of where the music could take you.
The concept of the image as sort of fusion of art genres is not lost to the painter Maria Belina Manalang, aka Pep, whose latest show “Just add water” at the Drawing Room along Pasong Tamo extension provides the viewer with endless possibilities of the album cover, here blown up 40”x40” into worthy amalgam of painting, photography, found matter among other particulates.
Not a corrugated iron sheet in sight, “Just add water” evokes the panoramic, slightly altered landscapes and vistas of the painter’s traveling years, which may be never-ending, i.e. the road as we know it goes on forever, while in background plays Pat Metheny’s Two Folk Songs from the album “80-81,” or a take from the same guitarist’s “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls.”
But here’s the artist herself: "I have always wanted to combine painting and photography. I am interested in portraying evocative images of landscapes—fields, mountains, the ocean, clouds, and skies."
“To create these paintings, I start by editing and printing the photograph on canvas. The printed photo will take up roughly half of the total canvas space. I complete the work by painting the rest of the space as a reimagined landscape while also modifying the photo with paint and modeling paste. The goal is to create a unified landscape that is not quite real but could be real.”
What is real when you walk through the doors of the Drawing Room, in that maze of galleries in Karrivin Plaza that includes Art Informal, is a hall of paintings for “Just add water,” 10 in all or five face-to-face of uniform size that summon views suffused with strange light, and another book from old Maginhawa comes to mind, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
It would be interesting what Berger would have said had he seen Pep’s paintings, which in themselves challenge the viewer to see things in a different light, in the land of the living, in a world we thought was not quite there yet still is, indeed as if it never left, like a childhood memory lost and found among the elements if not elementals—shocked by a rain of yellow flowers from who knows where.
Pep again: “I chose the title of the show ‘Just add water’ because I think of this process of building the landscape from a photograph and painting as a reconstitution of reality. The photograph serves as a starting point akin to the dried ingredient that must be rehydrated in order to be re-formed.
“Additionally, each of the paintings references water—the ocean, tidewater, heavy rain, clouds, fog, sedimentary flow forming alluvial plains, water drainage in continental divides.”
In the runup to the exhibit opening the painter had sent photos of smaller work, 20”x20” that could represent opposite views from a ship deck, possibly portside and starboard, which could work both as a diptych or standalone paintings, of distant shifting shorelines under a darkening sky, a sailor’s delight and/or foreboding.
Might they function, too, as album covers, an ephemeral art lost and found then lost again?
In an adjacent gallery is another exhibit, Christina Lopez’s “Apparitions” which features a shadow collage of some beautiful beasts made out of computer printout cards, thus an unintended counterpoint to Manalang’s fusion, a little bit house to go against the grain of batchmate’s brew.
In the Drawing Room on the second to the last Saturday of March was an unintended reunion of batang Diliman, now finding themselves in the shipwreck of creeping old age with whisky and wine and varied maintenance meds, clinging to soon-to-be driftwood either starboard or portside, not a corrugated iron sheet in sight. Maybe a treehouse in Area 1, but who knows if I am not making this all up?
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“Just add water” by Pep Manalang runs until April 26 at the Drawing Room, Pasong Tamo, Makati.
