“God has given you one face
And you make another.”
William Shakespeare
Two eyes… a nose… a mouth… two ears. These are all the physical features that man shares with the beast. But for his soul, the living spirit that resides in man, there would be no meaningful difference between the two.
On that single face can be gleaned all man’s history: joy and sorrow, myth and mystery, identity and character. It took the brilliant wit of Oscar Wilde to make the distinction between the sexes: “A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.” Each one, nonetheless, reads as an emanation of truth. On each face is indelibly etched the sum of a lifetime’s experiences.
Cesar Arro’s solo show, “Far Out,” now on view at Galerie Anna, is a fevered gaze directed at the human face, with a willful concentration as to strip the veil off the mesmerized visage. The artist has resolved to himself to discover what lies behind the tear-stained face or the blank expression that veers between contrasting emotional states: stillness and serenity of expression alternating with doubt and anxiety.
Phalanx of faces
Arro arrays a panorama of large canvases from which emerge a phalanx of faces, painted over with a network of lines, blots of colors, bleeding into each other in watery runs, overlaid passages of shapes that recall the lily pads floating in a country garden. These painterly touches are uniformly brushed over all the works, casting a transparent mist and momentarily intervening in the viewer’s perception of the image. This artifice of camouflage recalls the rude and abrasive, rug-swept faces in Francis Bacon’s savagely violated faces, effectively twisting the visage of the sitter in a grimace of pain.
Arro’s renditions, however, are in stark contrast. They are composed as adagios of emotion, tapping into psychological terrain. They gleam cryptically from behind a curtain of memories, in particular the highlighted glimmer of their eyes.
One work is more disturbingly virulent: a face that has been transformed into a vessel of contorted and writhing bodies, coiling round each other in the inescapable embrace of doom and damnation.
Arro ventures into the pop aesthetics of musical superstars such as John Lennon and Jim Morrison, two icons who met with tragic ends. One construes these choices to be the artist’s personal idols, with the self-knowledge that their troubled lives have been redeemed finally by immortality.
A touch of humor alleviates these grim and dolorous faces. It is the inclusion of the great Albert Einstein, the physics genius with his scraggly mound of disheveled curly hair, sticking his tongue out at the viewer. To be sure, it is a grotesque gesture more appropriate for a court jester, but serves as a welcome wisp of frivolity.
Stare closely at Cesar Arro’s faces: they carry the weight of the world through individual trauma and existential isolation, each looking far out into vast distances of reflection.
“Far Out” is on view at Galerie Anna (4/F, Artwalk, SM Megamall, Julia Vargas Ave. corner Edsa, Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila; tel. 632-4702511) until July 11.