I had my first brush with the “abstract” as an “expression” in a high-school art class. A friend was painting something amorphous, glow-in-the-dark specks floating in what looked like a murky pool of water. Neutral colors went every which way on the paper that I could not make sense of the subject. If I could hazard a guess, it most closely resembled bacteria under the microscope in one of those household cleaning agent TV commercials. And I wondered why, given so many things—the sky, the birds, the trees—someone as reasonable as he was would pay germs any mind.
He asked me what century did I inhabit. I said: “Well, how did I do?”
“Abstract ’yan,” he answered, later divulging that he was making sense of love as a concept. “It is deeper than the things you know to be true.”
Well, there are three things I know to be true: One, I don’t see love looking down on a microscope. Two, I would not make love to a bacteria. Three, he is the kind of creepy guy I don’t want to be stuck in the elevator with. But then he was the artist, our art teacher’s favorite, and I couldn’t shake off the feeling that, maybe, he sees something I don’t.
This came to mind recently while I was looking at the works of photographer Mayie Delgado at the gallery inside the Globe Telecom headquarters in Bonifacio Global City. Because I see an abstract painting through what my teacher said in college (“You cannot randomly douse a wall with paint and call it ‘art’, unless you’re an ‘artist’”), I don’t have a clear-cut idea of what’s “art” and, therefore, I might as well have been lost amid a sea of the art snobs who would stop pensive before a photograph and nod after having seemingly deciphered its meaning three minutes later.
The photographs were beautiful. But they were composed in a way I could not understand. So all I could do was cock my head and pretend to appreciate, although I had no idea of what’s going on in one of the photographs of things otherworldly and unfamiliar on the long wall, save for that they look like some portals to other dimensions.
In fact, the photographs are an abstraction of otherwise mundane things, music we don’t have time to listen to—like the formation in the water, the sand, the sky, or the porosity of travertine walls, from the simple to the elaborate.
“We need to retrain our eyes to see beyond the obvious,” Mayie said in an interview with the media, adding that typical photographers capture, say, the resplendence of the fleeting sunset just looking for the right framing or the right secondary element to include.
When Mayie takes a photograph, he veers away from the object and, instead, zeroes in his lens on the overlooked details, such as the lines, patterns, lights, shadows, the merry mix of colors, creating the abstraction by jigging the camera during exposure up or down or sideways.
He sees it everywhere: in an awning, on a wall, in the geometric pattern where the wall meets the floor, with an eye that made him appreciate the beauty of the world in ways he had never seen it before.
“Abstract photographs are not recognizable images, whose visual impact can wear out overtime or can become outdated,” Mayie said. “One can pass by abstract photographs and see a different interpretation each time.”
I did not understand it, but, in my visit, I was deeply drawn to commune with Mayie’s photograph No. 35, trying as much to figure out the subject as to give it a name. Inasmuch as the subjects in Mayie’s exhibit don’t hold shape, every picture is deliberately nameless and labeled only by the numbers. For as far as Mayie is concerned, we have different interpretations of something that gives an otherwise meaningless thing… well, meaning.
You hear these words and ask things like “Does a soul have a shape?” And then you look at this particular photograph and imagine: What if Edvard Munch’s The Scream were titled as The Rape, or Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as If I Were a Girl, or Mayie Delgado’s No. 35 as God?
1 comment
I am really an art snob and of course a frustrated artist.. But i really appreciate this article.. Thumbs up business mirror