“Mountain Top,” Dansoy Coquilla’s 23rd solo exhibition, reflects his almost insatiable need to paint the people he encounters.
A keen observer of people and a habitué of the most unlikely places in Metro Manila and beyond, Coquilla takes us this time to the Cordilleras where he has gained much inspiration from its original inhabitants and changing social climate.
The exhibition is timely, with the recent inclusion of the Cordillera pun-nok tugging ritual in Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
“Mountain Top” showcases the restless spirit of adventure and experiment of the artist to seek new environment and experience. Coquilla’s art has always contained a consistently strong narrative of time and place, from the city to the countryside.
His world is that of strident color and fundamental emotions, and the more celebratory aspects of the precarious human condition.
The subjects of food, religion and family are at the heart of his art. There is liveliness and openness in the execution of his work that are emotionally inclusive, as if one were part of welcoming family.
At the same time, there is a vital earthiness to his works that is refreshing. The Igorot people are among the most resilient traditional cultures in the world, a culture that has borne the full onslaught of an outside world that seeks to reshape it.
It may be a world devoid of glamour as Coquilla probes life in the raw, in a style characterized by slice-of-life reality.
He juxtaposes the indigenous figures with urban symbols to provoke ironies of ethnicity and to raise questions on national identity.
As social commentary, the works appeal for respect for the minority groups. The compositions have no sense of melancholy or sense of decay.
His subjects look up to the viewer and seem to be caught at the sudden glimpse of the moment, almost like a group “selfie.”
Coquilla’s signature “looking up” perspective and tight juxtapositions lead the way to his endlessly inventive and amusing engagement with the viewer.
Coquilla won the grand prize in the Art Association of the Philippines Annual Painting Competition 1996; Jurors’ Choice in the 4th Philip Morris Asean Art Awards 1997; and the University of the Philippines Gawad Chanselor para sa Sining Biswal 1997.
He was also one of five Philippine representatives to the Windsor and Newton Worldwide Millennium Painting Competition 1999 and a Thirteen Artists awardee of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2006.
He has had solo exhibitions in the Philippines and Singapore and is a video editor at the University of the Philippines’ National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development Audiovisual Group.
“Mountain Top” will be on view at BenCab Museum’s Gallery Indigo until Oct. 9.
BenCab Museum is at Km. 6 Asin Road, Tuba, Metro Baguio. Open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Closed on Monday. Call (074) 4427165, 0920-5301954, 0915-1286393; or e-mail [email protected]. Visit www.bencabmuseum.org.
