THE painter confesses: My name should have been “Bay Ani.” He should have confessed, too: My chairs are not for seating; they are for talking.
I must confess there was one reason I got lured into the chairs of this artist, because I have my own memories of chairs. Unlike Bayani Galera’s visual construction of that most ordinary of home fixtures, my chairs are illusory.
A few months back, I reconnected to friends old and warm from some 40-plus years ago. In that distance, I recalled a name, a face that I linked to being young and being absurd. In one of those meetings, when youth wanted to prove a singularity, I met Meyen. She is Meyen Hiponia Quigley now and our recollection had something to do with “chairs.” We both had the audacity to perform in Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs, a sample of that wondrous form called “Theater of the Absurd” when we were young.
Without informing her, I asked her about that play (she was quite shocked I still had that conversation in my mind), The Chairs. I didn’t tell her I was trying to make sense of this young artist’s work that had chairs in conversation, chairs that are no more furniture than they are forces of meanings, chairs that tell stories rather than sites from where one can narrate.
To my strange (because it has been delayed by years) question, Meyen Hiponia Quigley responded: “To me, chairs connote welcome, hospitality. I remember the frisson of excitement that would pass through our house, in my childhood, when people came and the chairs in the living room got filled. The chairs filled, lemonade was prepared, plates of pastries followed.
This warm association with chairs is what perhaps makes Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs all the more poignant for me, all the more devastating. The Old Man and the Old Woman are in their 1990s. The Old Man has come to a profound realization—an understanding so monumental that he has asked a special orator to communicate his insight to a glittering array of guests, including an emperor. The Old Man and the Old Woman busy themselves with preparing chairs for the guests that come, one by one. The room fills up—or so the Old Man and the Old Woman believe; the orator arrives, except he is mute. All that expectation, the excitement of having arrived at a truth one needs to share with the world is illusory after all, because there are no words to communicate that understanding, and the world—the world was just in the mind.”
The world being in the mind—this perhaps is the efficacy of the works of Bayani Galera as he conjures a world that is, contrary to the absurdist universe, full of meanings and signification.
In Sa Aking Pagtatapos (literally, “As I Finish or Complete…), Bayani Galera, using vinyl tiles, puts gray chairs over other gray chairs, in a play of chaos and monotone. At the top of the pile, he props up a chair in fire engine red as if saying the one who fulfills the task achieves the dream, sits above the throng that remain below. If one gazes at the top chair, one could see that it sits there precariously. A bit of shake below and we fear for the fall of that bright chair. The work was given the grand prize in the sculpture category of the 48th Shell National Student Art Competition.
The discourse of the painter continues in his 2016 work, a series composed of two paintings in oil: Kapag May Pagkakataon, Pinag-aagawan (literally, “If there is a chance, [then people] will fight or compete for it”). Series 1 and Series 2 are almost the same until you examine the degree of precarity on both compositions. The piles of chairs share the same fate: there is risk, instability, in the clustering of chairs. The artist generates a mise en scène where gradually scenarios undergo shifts and slight alterations. The two works were semifinalists in the Metrobank Art and Design Excellence and the GSIS Art Competition for 2016.
The reality in the works of Bayani Galera is how the chairs occupy space. It is in this temporality that his message persists about how objects (or humans) fight for a slot in the light, a place in that frame. This is most apparent in his piece Pangingibabaw (literally “being dominant”), where chairs in dull blue, white and gray float in space. A single brown chair on the left side tilts, apparent and different because of its color. The work is in water color and was a finalist in the 49th National Student Art Competition.
What takes my breath away in all of Bayani Galera’s work is his work in water color, titled Paglalakbay (Journey). By pulling with water the shades from the deep blue tint, he renders a subtle dynamism to the narrative—pallid chairs stocked up on pallid chairs, a ghastly movement pushed by what can be sensed as a liquefied ground. Are those washed blue and gray in soft whirling shapes the distant clouds, or are they part of the interminable sea?
I’ve been wanting to write about Bayani Galera’s chairs. It’s good the chance came when I had finished navigating the nearly meditative book For the Time Being: Ethnography of Everyday Life by Richard Quinney. The sociologist speaks of how “with imagination, the mundane and the sublime are one.” In Bayani Galera’s visual imagination, the chairs of extraordinary ordinariness blur the line between the quotidian and the quixotic, the profound and the popular, the everyday and the extraordinary.
Bayani Jamesson Galera is a graduate of the University of the East-Caloocan. He has won many awards and recognitions from major art competitions in the country.