ART multi-hyphenate Riel Hilario recounts being in the mountains in 2007. It’s 4 am and he’s in the wilderness chasing what he describes as “human-headed birds.”
The pursuit, however, ended with him falling into the water. Floating on his back, he looked up in the sky and saw the creatures in the guise of a woman, with fully extended wings for arms.
Hilario makes no qualms about being schizophrenic. He acknowledges having “altered states of consciousness,” and wants people to do the same, believing that “properly articulated, it can be a creative path.”
Such is the premise of Hilario’s ongoing exhibit at West Gallery in Quezon City, titled Phenomenology of Magical Thinking. Launched last week and ongoing until September 21, the show serves as the first of a series that tackles the artist’s mental condition, with hopes to inspire people facing the same issues.
Hilario said whenever he goes hypomanic, a condition marked by elation and hyperactivity, he would hear voices, get flooded with ideas and see visions. He never thought it to be a form of irregularity until 2013, when friends intervened to ask him about a months-long project wherein he mapped the graffiti on the Brooklyn Bridge. Only then did he realize that he has been suffering from the condition for a long time.
“Now, I’m trying to create a solution by describing this condition, so that other people who are who are like me can understand that it’s not something they should shy away from, but tune in a certain way,” Hilario said. “It can be helpful, it can be creative, and it can be used to illustrate the best things in your life.”
The three-pronged exhibit also presents the different hats of Hilario: as art curator, art writer/historian and visual artist.
Pinned on one side of the wall of the exhibit space are sculptures of open books with an embedded body part: eyes, ears, labia, to name a few. The artist calls it the visual translations of an unfinished novel that he has been writing for the past 25 years, which follows the story of a man who suddenly woke up with 1,000 senses.
“Like Kafka, but more positive,” he said.
The second part of the exhibit are illustrations of the artist’s favorite authors, using graphite on paper. Part of the series are sketches of Khalil Gibran, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Martin Buber, Nikos Kazantzakis and Bobi Valenzuela, a local author whom Hilario considers as his mentor.
Finally, the exhibit showcases three of the artist’s famed rebultos.
Hilario is a fourth generation wood-carver from Ilocos Sur. He only relearned the craft and created a full-time career in sculpture in 2008, after completing his extensive art studies in the Philippine High School for the Arts and the University of the Philippines, after a few years exhibiting as a painter, and after devoting time to cultural work, especially curatorial practice, as the curator of Boston Art Gallery and Pinto Art Gallery for seven years.
Hilario primarily hand-carves wood figures inspired by rebultos, a colonial art form of religious statuary introduced from Spain to the Philippines by way of Mexico in the 17th century. His subjects are often sourced from his visions, while the aesthetic is geared toward the contemporary.
The intent of the technique, the artist clarifies, is not to give the traditional a contemporary twist. He said that contemporary art carries the danger of homogenizing artists’ expression, citing that big art markets, such as New York and Japan dictate what is supposed to be the “international look” of the genre.
What he does, then, is not proposing the vernacular to the contemporary, but the opposite of it.
“I’m getting expressions of the contemporary into the vernacular, or trying to speak contemporary through the vernacular,” Hilario said, which is contrary to a common practice in the 1980s and 190s when artists tried to use traditional art as a counter measure against international art.
He believes the behavior stems from insularity, which some Philippine artists are also guilty of.
A well-traveled artist who has exhibited globally and served artist residencies in a number of countries, Hilario recalled the moment when this belief system was formed. It was in New York, and Hilario was working on his rebultos when Cambodians came in and immediately recognized the sculptures as something similar to theirs.
“I realized that it’s so insular to think of indigenous art as exclusive to a certain place,” he said. “To think that something is local to the Philippines when, in fact, there are sculptures that reflect those that are, for example, in Japan.”
“So that is my attempt,” he added, “I’m trying to find what are culturally similar to ours elsewhere. That’s why all my images are always in between the national and the international, because I really believe in that cultural unity somewhere that contemporary art can provide.”
Hilario said travel has also afforded him to expand his artistic language. A manifestation is the rebultos that are on display at the artist’s ongoing exhibit, patterned after the human-headed birds Hilario chased in 2007.
In The Summer that Never Ends, the inspiration is a river in Korea. If viewed from the side, the piece reveals itself to be a vertical body of water with plants jutting out from the wings and thighs. Hilario also carves with anatomical consideration, such as in this piece wherein the inner thighs are constricted as the toes are slightly pointed to each other.
“Even with the colors, you can see that they’re different from my previous works,” the artist said.
Hilario said there’s much more to discover and learn. He wants to deep dive into the world of carving and plans to visit Alaska to understand how they carve totem poles. He has also set up studios in La Trinidad, Paete and Dipolog to immerse in the acclaimed local carving communities.
“In the future, I want to create a lexicon of traditional carving methods, a compendium of carving terminologies,” he said. “It’s intangible heritage.”