About the Event
A man is thrown off from his hammock and falls into a hole. The cavity is in the shape of a big inverted head. He is trapped. It is dark inside the hole. A storm brews in the skies above, the clouds covering a sun-like compass rose. Rain starts to fill the cavity, slowly submerging the man under water. But just as the water reaches the top, the cavity collapses, pulling the man as if he were being sucked into a drain.
These are one of the unexpected surrealist scenes in ‘Hide and Seek', the latest video project by Filipino artist Paulo Vinluan. The title work that headlines his debut show at Silverlens Manila, it is a deeply lyrical piece that touches on an issue that affects many today. It is a sketch of the emotional and psychological roller coaster experienced by those whose lives are marked by impermanence, whether by choice or force. These are people for whom the definition of ‘home’ remains slippery and elusive. It is a condition that the artist is all too familiar with.
Since 2007, Vinluan has been splitting his time between Brooklyn and Manila. Pushed and pulled by duty from one city to the other, he journeys the long distance, traversing time zones, countries, oceans. This suite of works is a response to living this transcontinental life, which may be glamorous on the surface, but carries a price: the haunting feeling of rootlessness.
This show may quite simply be about how one attempts to map out a concept of home. But Vinluan approaches this conundrum by looking at its nature, seeing ‘home’ existing both as a tangible and an imagined place.
For the video 'Hide and Seek', Vinluan created a fictitious space where his narrative can slowly unfold. To borrow from Vinluan’s own words, it is the site where the story is slowly “unpacked.” On this stage, we see a man journey through his emotions stemming from displacement: anxiety, vulnerability, disorientation.
Vinluan’s artificial world references two distinct but recognizable cartographies: those of medieval maps and those of video games. These elements, unexpected in their juxtapositions, help create an intriguing dimension within which Vinluan's protagonist could operate. This mixing of unrelated images and iconography reveal ‘hidden affinities’, echoing Magritte and his surrealist paintings, while at the same time extends the exploration of the theme of rootlessness: that feeling of not exactly belonging to where one is at.
This video projection marks an interesting development in Vinluan's practice. Long known for his illustrative, surrealist paintings, Vinluan has been experimenting with animation as he seeks to discover the potential of moving images as a channel for his ideas. Though untrained as a filmmaker, animation is not foreign territory for Vinluan. From 'Hide-and-Seek’s’ soundtrack to the rubbery contortions of its protagonist makes to its pencilly grayscale rendering, they are a throwback to the animated series Vinluan grew up with.
And for the first time for a show, he uses animated video an anchor and departure point for his paintings. Here there are five, all subsequently made. The small-scale ‘Vessel I’ depicts a barefoot man, slightly prostrated and unmoving. Placed in a vitrine-like glass box, he resembles like a lonesome pawn on the chess-like floor.
‘Map (Hide and Seek)’ is a diptych that provides a panoramic view of the invented landscape found its namesake video, with all the key elements - hammock, storm clouds, inverted head - laid out like - as the title says - a wall map.
But one of the most striking images of this animated movie is that of a figure, bent-down, his face buried between his knees, tightly grasping himself so he can fit inside the box he is placed in. The box's sides slowly fall off. One has a narrow window, another a door, another the sky: forebodings of a final escape from the entrapment limbo imposes.
Those whose lives are marked by impermanence seek to free themselves from this limbo, a state where many of us are finding ourselves in as this age heightens mobility and transnationalism.
And so these works resonate to those for whom the concept of home remains unresolved. For a home it is not just an address or a structure. It is a state of being. As essayist Pico Iyer, the great chronicler of this human condition, has once said, "a home is not just a place where you sleep; it is a place where you stand."