Agang Maganda has always been fascinated with dreams, deep memories, and the unconscious. Over the years he has consistently captured the lyricism and poetic moments of our dreamscapes.
His use of subdued colors, nocturnal scenes, images of seeds and pods, thin wisps of cloud, suggests not only everyone’s yearning to understand dreams but also to communicate with the dream world, to establish a link with the unconscious that has been severed perhaps by modernity, and to be in harmony with an unknown force that may have a connection with one’s distant past.
In “Scherzo, Stanza & Surreal,” Maganda once again treats us to personal intimations of the dream world, only this time he also turns to music and poetry as modes of expression.
Splendid sonority
For Maganda, dreams are not just visual but sensory, aural experiences as well. What is not depicted or cannot be portrayed visually are complemented or counterpointed by splendid sonority.
“Beyond the Sky” is a pod that slowly withers but the song is about missing his father. If dream language is associative, then one can see in this work how nature imbibes painful physical separations: The pod that falls and slowly uncovers becomes the objective correlative of the artist’s feelings. More importantly, the work tells us something about the nature of our feelings, our capacities to affect and be affected. It shows that life is a perpetual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, emergencies.
In “A Garden Prelude,” nature’s life-giving capacity is explored and lyrically articulated. The garden is the zone in which feelings and conditions take place. One sees various life cycles. Elements such as vapor may be invisible at first, but it condenses and falls as rain for plants and animals. One sees seeds sprouting, growing as plants, flowers, pollinating and then withering.
It is not surprising that one’s experiences of leaving friends and loved ones, as well as reunions with them, all find their palpable expressions in nature’s cycles.
Art critic and fictionist John Berger, who passed away recently, said that art is indissolubly linked to personal experience of pain and suffering and that the encounter with beauty is always an exception. Art thrives despite the ugliness, the temporal, and the pain. —CONTRIBUTED
In celebration of the National Arts Month, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts Gallery will mount the exhibit, “Scherzo, Stanza, & Surreal: A Wanderer’s Journey in Music, Poetry and Painting by Agang Maganda,” Feb. 6-28. E-mail nccagallery09@gmail.com.