Shadows in autumn

What do you find in Norberto Roldan’s exhibition succeeding a retrospective show[1]? In Rituals of Invasion and Resistance, Roldan restored original installations, reappropriated from his body of previous works and constructed new indices that clue in the conditions of living through spaces that transact the post-colony and the post-national. The exhibition that is the subject of this essay prompts us then to locate our reading of an autumnal period of an artist’s practice. Staged aptly as the first solo exhibition in his representing gallery, How can you jump over shadows when you don’t have one anymore? gives a ring to a cultivated lifework that marks its genesis thirty-plus years prior. The space marks four coordinates that assemble Roldan’s method of the assemblage that surfaces polyphonically - in parts they are literary and painterly, at most they are explicitly object-directed and they are embraced by subjectivities around the anthropological and autobiographical. The permutations of his iconography have been a preoccupation of other critics, writers, and curators who register the artist’s order of things as a conduit to the urgencies that a receptive practice must be confronting.

When Roldan is addressed as an artist, the reading of his works frequently relies on making meaning out of his images. There are cursory associations to his seminary background as a means to mark the proximity to the mass of Catholic imagery and their abstractions. In other trajectories, they are read within the mania of Philippine societies as largely syncretic and prone to manufacture mashups of popular taste and propaganda in the image and likeness of whichever social strata receives this scraps to put them together. The vocabulary of Roldan’s works can be seen as deeply vernacular, glorified as an experience wrought from “encountering the Philippines” on foot, by the side streets, in its devotion-specific churches, amidst the onslaught of commercial paraphernalia.

But what does that mean to have a sense of the Philippines and a sensibility on how material cultures of city and province converge and divide in an artistic, intellectual and community-driven practice like Roldan’s? Perhaps the vernacular indices are not maps to “Philippine culture”. Rather, the works are vernacular to Roldan’s own cultural constructions.

There is a conjecture to be made between the choice of the exhibition title to its quotation of Jean Baudrillard’s dedication in Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1991-1995[2]. Coincidentally, Roldan presents this exhibition at a similar period when Baudillard wrote the texts that were gathered in the book Fragments. Like a self-retrospecting gesture, he makes us witness to fragments from the previous series - his cabinet pieces and components inside gilded frames refers us to particular series from previous shows such as In Search For Lost Time[3]. Other works find their new iteration in this show in Silverlens as these are serial in nature, so much as the constituents and their permutation persist to be regenerative - the production and circulation of images are infinite. The Unbearable Whiteness of Beauty is recollected as an exhibition[4] of assemblage and paintings but takes an iteration in this show as printed collections of the images that circulate foremost as representations of beauty. “Litany”, too, is an ongoing series[5] that allude to the mental habit constructed by the perfunctory recitation of the chronology of saints, the titles of the virgin mother and the godhead.

Can we configure the aggregate of signs and symbols not as solitary semantics? What happens when we locate Roldan, instead, as the reader? The process of his art-making is largely prompted by the oblique directions that reading engenders. Circumlocutory and ambiguous, the artist’s arrangements of the collections of icons, images, and texts mirror the nature of reading. Besides the title of his exhibition, sure, there are other markers that reference his inclination to turn to literary cues like an autobiographical quote of Jack Kerouac in the “Hornet” painting and aphorisms of William Carlos Williams’ as names to Roldan’s altar installations. Seriality succeeds reading, as it essentially jogs the artist’s already discursive mind.

What is the subject of Roldan’s reading? Why is seriality triggered by, and what does it continue to activate? What we encounter in Roldan’s solo exhibitions are the composites of objects that come together through his practiced impulse as an artist known to write and re/write the semantics of indices. They reclaim meaning and substance in the way he conflates the notions of lived and living pasts. While the texts in Baudrillard’s books are in an intermediate point between notes and manuscript, the works in Roldan’s show in Silverlens offer categorical deductions. The moral behind “how can you jump over shadows when you don’t have one anymore” is about an impasse to the strategies on legacy. Roldan at times can be ambivalent with the tokenistic representations attached to him - as a former seminarian, as an iconoclast, as a politicized practitioner - but he would always turn to things as harbingers of ideas and ideology. What we locate as messages in Roldan’s works have always been consistent - the misuses of power, the economies of peacekeeping, how social constructs perpetuate not blindly but by design. These are shadows thin out and get extinguished, like a material without an image, an image without meaning, a text without voice. Roldan is ambivalent because such portrayals beget their flattening. How can we turn to his objects the way he has used them - repatriating lost, misplaced shadows? “Fugitives in Captivity” reminds us of how we deal with shadows like how we deal with histories - unconscious at best, dismissive at worst. That is how triggers come necessarily. And in this case, through Roldan’s works, they come in the form of objects, images, and keywords, to see where we can establish our shadows. How can you jump over shadows when you don’t have one anymore also means “how can you deal with your past if you don’t have those memories?”[6]

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[1] Norberto Roldan: Rituals of Invasion and Resistance: Survey of Installation Works 1992-2017 was held from 2 September to 5 October 2017 in Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Philippines.

[2] Published in 1997, this book collects Baudrillard’s crystallized expositions of his notion on objects from his notebooks when he was composing The Illusion of the End and The Perfect Crime.

[3] This speculation is grounded on press mileage that circulates images of Roldan’s works. The particular reference to this is Rogue’s feature published on September 1, 2017.

[4] Presented as an exhibition at Art Fair Philippines in 2015.

[5] Wasak! Filipino Art Today (Distanz Publishing, 2016) features a “Litany” work captioned to be produced by Roldan in 2014.

[6] Conversation with the artist, 24 September 2018. 

- Siddharta Perez

Norberto Roldan’s (b. 1953) practice is rooted in social and political issues. His installations, assemblages and paintings of found objects, text fragments and found images address issues surrounding everyday life, history and collective memory. His artistic process engages with ways in which material objects are re-appropriated in another context. He graduated with a degree in BA Philosophy from St. Pius X Seminary and took his BFA in Visual Communication from the University of Santo Tomas. He is represented in several landmark surverys like No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (2013); Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century, National Gallery Singapore (2015); SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, National Art Centre Tokyo (2017); and Passion and Procession: Art of the Philippines, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2017).

Roldan founded Black Artists in Asia in 1986, a group with a socially and politically progressive practice. In 1990 he initiated VIVA EXCON (Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference), the longest running biennale in the Philippines. He co-founded Green Papaya Art Projects in 2000 which remains to be the longest-running independent and multi-disciplinary platform in the country.