A GROUP EXHIBIT SUCH AS ?Happily Unhappy? (Blanc Gallery, Mandaluyong) has a lot going for it, other than the possibility, and the fact, of a smorgasbord of artists.

There is the brilliance of a concept, the idea of being happy with one?s unhappiness, that can carry an exhibit like this to brilliance. This banks on the possibilities that such a title allows: What is it to be happily unhappy? Where does one take that idea, and how can it be configured and reconfigured? It also presumes a certain amount of irony.

The danger with irony in an exhibit such as ?Happily Unhappy? (curated by Jordin Isip and Louie Cordero) is the possibility that a greater number of the participating artists would work with the concept in the same way. The irony then becomes less potent.

Irony in imagery and color

Dina Gadia?s ?Wig Murders,? a diptych, renders two vintage American female portraits as happily unhappy in its contradictions. At the back of each woman?s head are two bones formed into an X?the kind that?s used to symbolize poison?and yet both these women look prim and proper. Their eyes are without emotion, but each woman is wielding a water gun. With their faces and blouses splattered all over with colored paint, it is clear they are playing and are having fun.

Katie Turner?s ?Teenager #1? and ?Teenager #2? are portraits in acrylic and gouache of contemporary teenagers, one obviously male, the other seemingly female but really is quite androgynous. Their currency lies in their looks: One wears a sports jersey, the other a graphic tee; one has clean-cut hair, the other has teased bangs.

While ?Teenager #1? looks straight at the camera with nary a smile, ?Teenager #2? has a very slight, almost mischievous, smile. In the context of the exhibit, these portraits in black ink against white are unique in its simplicity. What makes it stand out even more is its rendering of what is both happy and unhappy in these portraits: A splash of sky-blue and lavender are drawn over the faces of ?Teenager #1? and ?Teenager #2,? respectively, showing images of a rainbow and thunderbolt, clouds and raindrops and stars, and what looks like a whistle, in what seems to be images of happiness.

(Un)happiness that resonates

MM Yu?s print ?A Few of My Favorite Things? looks like abstract work from afar, filled with dots of bright color and random shapes, but up-close reveals itself to be a garbage dump. Obviously a take on what is unhappy about the happiness that capitalism and materialism brings. In an exhibit with a tendency to be in-your-face in its grossness, distortion or violence, Yu?s work is one that resonates.

Isip?s three works, all portraits (?Blue Tangle Pink Shirt,? ?Looking Back,? and ?Elegy?), appear with an installation of four heads that look exactly like the faces of his portraits. None of these images are smiling; one is even an image of the back of a head.

What is interesting is the way there remains to be an amount of happiness in the moroseness in Isip?s works. The colors aren?t as bright as the rest in the exhibit, and yet the light blues and yellows, the hues of pink and off-white, and the gray of the installation, seem to just be enough for the works to succeed in its assertion of our sadnesses being spaces of possible happiness, where colors may be less than bright, but are reminiscent of the possibilities of change and renewal, in the same way that the sky changes hues at sunset and sunrise.

It is in this sense, and in the hands and minds of Gadia and Turner, Yu and Isip, that an exhibit premised on irony succeeds. Because these artists don?t just bank on childhood and nostalgia, distortion and in-your-face aesthetic. Instead, they work with the possibilities in which that irony may be stretched and reconfigured, ascertained and questioned, and, hit a core of what it?s like to be happily unhappy.