Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century French poet and critic, remarked that once an artist has found the subject he was born to paint, half of the work is done.

How often have we witnessed talented and skillful artists aimlessly shifting from one subject to another, in purposeless sifting of other artists’ catalog of trademark styles and images.

Even during college years, the professors of Jeff Dizon at University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts had early taken cognizance of their young student’s markedly superior draftsmanship.

They have identified him, in the lingo of the times, as a rising star, a natural stylist destined to make a name for himself, inventive in line and color, indeed prodigally gifted and ready to display his visual talents.

The succeeding years, after Dizon left school, had proved prophetically correct, with his works consistently snapped up by collectors who were delighted by the highly detailed, often ornamentally embellished line and lushly colored, paintings of Filipino maidens, growing more orchidaciously luscious through the years.

These were the “Dos Marias” and the “Tres Marias” which collectors seemingly could not have enough of, flying off the walls of Alegria Art Gallery soon as they were hung.

But as was bitterly experienced by Dizon himself, success can often be too much to handle, so much so that the artist spiraled down a path of self-destruction, distressing his marriage and family. In due time, spiritual forces intervened and led him to turn his back on his erring ways and, more significantly to embrace the Christian life. Today, a miraculously restored man, both physically and spiritually, Jeff Dizon has found his stable bearings and his North Star, in the dedicated and assiduous study and observance of the Word of God.

‘Diviners’

In his major exhibition on view at SM Art Center, Dizon unveils the result of several years’ worth of sustained work, bringing to visual life lessons from the Bible. The show is titled “Diviners,” and the specific, lacerating focus is on the diviners, deceivers and false witnesses of spiritual deception. With his sure sense of style in full panoply and the armaments of technical skills effecting a mounting complexity, Dizon addresses the surreptitious ways in which man is misled alluringly by promises of fortune and salvation or, indeed, an escape into the ecstasies of a forbidden paradise.

Dizon has not spared himself. In the work “My Testimony,” a brutally startling personal revelation of the artist as a former drug user. Mercifully, this is a memory of a long-ago painful past for which the artist had already made amends, not least to himself and his family. The notion of a deceitful transport into a “high” region of pleasure is symbolized by the angel wings that can send man soaring to the heights. Symbols abound, namely the litter of green apples alluding to the forbidden fruit of Eden and, more hideously, the sight of a pair of bobbit worms, those sea monsters with the sharp scissor-like teeth that attack prey with lightning speed.

Indeed, symbolism is the visual instrument Dizon wields in pinning down the essence of his biblically-inspired works. The dog that was so graphically described as licking the sores of Lazarus, the snail that insidiously gnaws, nibbling a fresh sprout of a leaf into nothing, the shell with its hollow interior, the pig as a foulest animal whose impure blood must not be drunk, the Tarot cards that deliver man to his perdition, the skull as a representation of death and mortality, the evil frog whom God sent as a plague to the Egyptians and, in Revelations, the unclean spirits spewed out of the mouths of Satan and the anti-Christ—all these symbols intensify the darkness of the biblical truths, condemning harlots and sorcerers, adulterers and astrologers, sexual deviants and fortune tellers, worshippers of the devil and the dead.

Fire-and-brimstone

The large-scale works are indubitably fire-and-brimstone in tone and spirit while action-packed and crammed in the delineation of the dramatic narrative that unfolds in simultaneous and layered montages heaped one atop another. Verily, the show amounts to an artistic housecleaning and spiritual cleansing for which the artist seemed to have left no sinful stone unturned.

Dominating the show is the triptych titled “The Adultery of Gomer,” the woman infamous for her harlotry, who was married to the prophet Hosea, whose faithfulness to her was reflective of the faithfulness of God to His people, the Israelites, who had become spiritual whores.

With this show, the artist refracts his own Christian beliefs and convictions into the very substance of his art, thus rehabilitating not only his spiritual life, but his creative force as well. The Bible is the very subject Jeff Dizon was born to paint. —CONTRIBUTED