Lawrence Ypil

IN Jose “Chong” Ardivilla’s, cover piece for his first solo exhibit, “Disturbing My Peace”, shows the portrait of a man in a suit with a cocked gun for a head, and the smoke of his nozzle (or is it his nose) which really comes from a lit cigarette, as he sits (it rests) on a chair “big boss mafia” style as if he was deliberating the life of a caught spy in an old gangster movie.

Or is it the other way around where the gun is seen as a man (and not the man a gun), and the smoke from a puff is meant to be read like shot just fired, and chair becomes, well, more of itself?

Who is to tell, given this collection of rubbercut prints (explained by the artist, as a stamp pad in reverse: paper being pressed on the plain of finely etched rubber), which is really a collection of portraits of sorts: of men who are guns, and women whose faces are really birdcages, and virgin mary’s become the patron saints of not hope and love and help but pragmatism, and killed dreams, and urban decay. One isn’t quite sure whether these are pictures of animals turning into men, men into animals as in “Cultivating Temptations” where a man grapples with the snake and the slither of his own desire, or in “The Weight of Memory” where the mind becomes a flock of strange birds, and memory a burden of wings.

All of this to no surprise, of course, if one had the fortune of actually getting to know Jose who spent a good number of years as the editorial cartoonist of Manila Standard: the news of everyday being more carnivorous than human, and where the human affairs (of mostly politics or tragedies – the politics of tragedies, the tragedy of politics) follow the shape less of the civilized than the animalistic.

I, of course, knew him much earlier on – back in high school in fact. When in between classes, or right at the heart of lectures, Jose could be found scribbling a fast caricature of our teacher’s faces: all on pad paper. Or some classmate, who by some fateful circumstance, had caught Jose’s errant eye enough to be the recurring mascot of his visual documentary of the highs and lows, the turns and edges, the comedy and tragedy that was high school. In fact, I found it a wonderful kick in the knee to know that the years had granted Jose the grace to find himself the opportunity to have his artful puns, his visual side remarks, his penciled commentaries of a vandalism, finally find themselves framed, and hung, and yes, sold!

The good thing about having artists as friends, friends as artists, is that one’s bound by hook or by crook to have one’s life immortalized (if not caricatured) on the page, or the canvas, or the stage. No secret’s ever really held (or for that matter told) when you’re with an artist: not that good green joke (which becomes a literal swath of green on the road), or that one hilarious stumble (that becomes a word in a novel), or that one gigantic confession which becomes by virtue of friendship the stuff to write, the core to draw a whole exhibit on. Which really becomes both blessing and risk of words and art.

And which my dear childhood friend Jaja, of course, knows. Jaja whom I spent much of that night of the opening of Jose’s exhibit laughing our heads off trying to recall every childhood blunder of a dance step we had committed. “When do you write about our childhood days?” Jaja asks, with a wink to her smile, knowing there was much, much to tell on both sides of the story. “Give me three years,” I say. And she and I both know that it better be well worth the wait.