THIS YEAR?S ?LOOKing for Juan? (Vargas Museum, UP Diliman) is in a bigger, brighter venue and doesn?t seem to want to stop with talking about identity.

With the question of everyday heroes, cliché is the name of this game. It doesn?t help that the way the exhibit was curated grouped the works thematically, making the clichés more obviously about sameness.

Name it, and you?ve got that Filipino worker here. There are no call-center agents, or yuppies, or any white-collar workers; instead, there are images of the kargador, the fisherman, the farmer, the magtataho, the teacher, the health worker, the basurero (a sculpture).

One wonders at what point all of this recedes into a politically incorrect romance. After all, these workers aren?t given lives other than the work they do; and in the few paintings that show workers? conditions, badly written captions ruin things altogether.

Thanks for ?Minimum Wage Earner,? by Renato Barja, where the construction worker is rightly the color of the soot he creates and lives with; where he is given a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a sunrise in the background, where his big eyes are allowed their sadness and weariness, even their defeat; where the last thing you would think of is celebration or romance.

Jojo Ballo?s ?Tuwing Umaga,? in charcoal on canvas, would?ve been more powerful without its caption.

Maan de Loloya?s ?Kargador? fails for its cleanliness, which doesn?t work as irony (she is carrying on her head an MMDA sign, pink stilettos, guns, a balikbayan box, a buwaya).

OFW cliché

We know the OFW is the new hero, and so there are a good number of works here that are about this heroism.

Yveese Belen?s ?In Every Corner? is divided into squares filled with images of brown workers doing various jobs. What is extraordinary is the detail where the workers are actually in action doing their jobs, making this more of a tribute to what they do rather than just a romantic notion of them.

The other OFW paintings don?t quite survive their captions, although Cana Valencia?s ?Bagong Bayani? somehow does: Much of the canvas is taken up by a Swiss knife made into the Philippine flag. What the knife?s various tools reveal are Filipinos? various jobs across the world.

And those mother images? Clichés of pregnancy and giving life; holding the child?s hand and protecting her; motherhood as powerful in itself. That might be true, but there are so many other ways in which mothers are heroes.

Powerful imagery

Dante Lerma?s ?Call Juan-24/7-Heroes? has such a powerful image: A woman in a Maria Clara costume standing against a Coca-Cola refrigerator. Her foot is up against the wall, revealing running shoes, and she is holding her phone as if writing a text message. From afar, it is a rendering of the notion of womanhood and tradition, the powerful woman vis-a-vis the meek and tamed. But the notion of heroes being on call is disappointing.

Cathy Lasam?s ?Mommy? is wonderful in its experimentation with texture, folding up paper to create a pattern that renders the quiet image of the mother more dynamic, more interestingly alive and truthful.

Janelle Tang?s ?May Bago Akong Laruan? layers acrylic on canvas to create the layers of a paper doll. Here, the clothes floating on the canvas create the image of a mother and child. But the caption is an absolute let-down.

Fernando Sena?s ?Tatay, Nanay, Mga Tunay na Bayani? is a take on the cliché of parents as heroes, done in cubist abstraction. Two tiny one-dimensional faces represent parents, creating what look like structures that go up higher and higher. It?s a celebration of the default power of parenting, to build, to create, regardless of whether it wants to or not.

Universal Pinoy hero

What is more problematic here is the idea of every Filipino as hero. It is here that the paintings seem to all work toward the media-created notion that we can all change this world just by voting once. As if things are ever that easy. Here is the teacher, the student-journalist, the environmentalist. There are too many notions of hands that we?ve seen before, some of them in our grade-school art projects.

The ones that survive this are those that have different images. Dante Aligaen?s ?It?s in Our Hands (It Always Was)? is a black-and-white mixed-media piece depicting a skull from which emanates a halo and the rays of a sun, with flowers/grass/weeds spewing from the main image, and bombs ready to fall from the sky. It?s a fascinating take on pride, the kind that can get us all messed up.

Liza Flores? ?You, Me? could?ve done with a more creative title. It is wonderful, where the notion of reflection works.

The rest of the works insist we can all be heroes, be it through images of Rizal (too many of them, too!) or through images of the youth as the future. But while this seems wonderful, the idea of our own individual heroisms at this point doesn?t seem all that possible.

Buen Calubayan?s ?Pinger? seems to be the answer. It?s nothing but a black tarpaulin with an enlarged red digital print of the artist?s dirty finger, accompanied by this line: ?Ako ang simula ng pagbabago? O panggagago??

How?s that for a caption that works.