Art Circle Gallery Curator Sarah Alcantara had only one guideline. In the group show that was to bring to the fore the Filipino food, along with the correlated concepts of agriculture and hospitality, the subject of participating artists must be local dishes.
What seemed like a simple request was as open to interpretation as it could get for creatives, and the results proved just that. While there were a number of paintings that depicted your sinigangs and adobos to an exquisite, almost multisensory degree, others expectedly dared to go outside the plate, if you will.
One was Manuel Baldemor, a renowned painter who renders folk art in geometric forms. He opted to portray the vibrant life of a Filipino kitchen with a tableful of colorful ingredients. There’s a rainbow of vegetables resting on the left side of his piece, simply titled Kusina, with a transparent pile of fishes beside a tray of plates and utensils on the right.
Painter Ronnel Cainto also went for an image of ingredients, rather than of a finished dish. He focused on the items needed to cook sinigang, wherein laid out on a red table are a pair of bangus, talong, kamatis and batuan, or a souring ingredients commonly used by Ilonngos on their dishes, such as cansi and KBL (kadyos, baboy, langka).
Some artists even went further and interpreted the theme of Filipino food with political commentary on the state of farmers, while others presented mothers who are off to the market with their child on one hand and a basket on the other.
This wide-ranging spread of quality illustrations made the group show, titled Patikim! The Art of Filipino Hospitality, more of a delectable salo-salo. The exhibit ran for 10 days until last week at Art Center in SM Megamall.
Organized by Art Circle Gallery in partnership with the Mama Sita Foundation, the social arm of the international Filipino food brand Mama Sita’s, Patikim! was served to raise awareness on Filipino culinary heritage through art, as well as to cater to a scholarship program for aspiring chefs. Proceeds from the show were dedicated to the tuition of would-be Filipino-American chefs from the Academy of Culinary Education in California.
Aside from the celebration of food and art, the exhibit opening also saw a forum that tackled the challenges in the Filipino food industry, particularly the implications of the Republic Act 8172, or the nationwide salt iodization law.
Mama Sita Foundation President Clara Reyes-Lapus gave a short talk about the sorry state of local salt makers, who find it difficult to export their products since the law requires all salt made in the Philippines should be iodized.
The salt law was passed in 1995 to fight iodine deficiency. The forum, however, questioned the relevance of the salt law in the current health, economic, and food landscape.