Melankolia

 

Essay 21. MELANKOLIA

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

Pinggot Zulueta's solo show, "Melankolia", opened last January 16 at the Saturday Group Gallery at Shangri-la Plaza. It was a well attended affair. Gathered there were fellow artists and friends who, like me, are fans I'm sure of Zulueta.

The exhibit showcased once again Zulueta's mastery of the pen and ink medium---a mastery very evident early in his career as editorial cartoonist. His cartoons of that period were visual witticisms at their best.

I have said before that the era, which stretched
from the waning years of the Marcos regime up to Cory Aquino's presidency, was the golden age of political cartooning in the Philippines. Who can dispute that when we saw the likes of Jose Tence Ruiz, Dengcoy Miel, Neil Doloricon, Dante Perez, Willy Aguino, Benjo Laygo, Benjamin Lontoc, Ludwig Ilio, Net Billones, Edwin Agawin, and of course, Pinggot Zulueta working at the same time and turning in daily works that are high in humor and artistic skill. And high in courage too, because the cartoons they did were adversarial and took delight in lambasting without end the powers that be.

This new suite of exquisitely done pen and inks by Zulueta, which could only be the handiwork of a real master, is no longer about politics. These drawings, which are psychological dissections this time of the minds of disturbed persons, easily belies the claim that what sell in the art market nowadays are happy colorful paintings and abstracts. The drawings are mesmerizing all right, but the tone set by the very title, Melankolia, is dark. Nevertheless, despite the forebodings and sense of uneasiness evoke in viewers by these drawings, they still were all sold out---a testament to Zulueta's status today as a significant, or even major, Filipino artist.

Melancholia as we all know is a mental state marked by deep sadness and paranoia. Zulueta's drawings depict that condition very well. You'll notice that the heads of each focal figure were either non-existent or enveloped in a cloud of tangled intensely cross-hatched lines, hinting at the confused mental state of the depressive person.

One drawing, the one printed on the poster, shows a bird-headed figure strongly reminiscent of "doctors" during the bubonic plague pandemic in Europe, who wore masks similar to that bird head, which were filled with spices believed capable of warding off or killing whatever microorganism it was that caused the plague. The naked figure stands on a landscape littered with a disembodied bearded head, his original head perhaps, and bisected by a river made dazzling by a full moon. Moon is luna, and luna is the root word of lunatic. From this word association, we can deduce that the figure is hallucinating and is teetering on the edge of sanity.

Below is the notes I wrote on Zulueta on the occasion of the second exhibit of the Papelismo group at Galerie Anna in 2014.

"PINGGOT ZULUETA was an editorial cartoonist for many years for Abante. In the 2012 group show "Papelismo", Zulueta exhibited for the first time about 40 of his best editorial cartoons, which became an instant hit with the gallery-goers. An eye-opener of sorts, that exhibition made people realized that Zulueta belonged to that rank of top and highly-regarded political cartoonists working for different papers in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Now, that period, which began from the declining years of the Marcos regime up to the rise of Cory Aquino to the Presidency, may be considered as the golden age of political cartooning in the Philippines because of the sheer number of talents working at the same time who turned out editorial cartoons that combined wry humor with a high level of artistry.

"Zulueta became a New Zealand citizen after he and his family emigrated to that country. When a job opportunity as photographer with the Manila Bulletin presented itself, Zulueta returned to take on that job. Among the press photographers active now, Zulueta could be regarded as the first among the  more prominent ones. The reason for this is simple--- Zulueta, aside from being very good with his camera is also a high-profile practitioner of serious painting. Before going into photography, and after his editorial cartooning phase, Zulueta actively painted and exhibited abroad---in Australia and the United States, among others countries.

"Zulueta's collaborative exhibition with National Artist for Poetry Virgilio Almario was landmark. The novelty of that show gained much media mileage for the two. In that show, "Makakatulog Ka pa Kaya?", Zulueta displayed what looked like photo reproductions of street children and other denizens of the slums streaked with neon-colored lines, and bordered with multi-colored excerpts of Almario's poems. That exhibit revealed what Zulueta is up to these days---experimentation. Zulueta had also done a lot of abstracts lately, which are all on a par with the abstracts of painters working exclusively in that idiom."