Monnar's Dreamscapes

Essay 24. MONNAR'S DREAMSCAPES

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

REVERIE: DREAMS AND VISIONS, Monnar Baldemor's forthcoming solo show opens on April 2 at the Artologist Gallery. The exhibit will showcase Monnar's new collection of paintings that analyzes the dream state. Unlike his relatively recent works that are more mundane in character, being paintings that deal with mother and child themes, Lenten and fiesta scenes, and musician and circus motifs, his present collection are explorations and depictions of the workings of the human mind.

Monnar's usual 'menagerie' of disembodied orbs that look like eyes, predatory animals, aircraft, and apparently malfunctioning electrical gadgetry are still present in his new suite. But he now took his art to a higher intellectual level when he tackled themes that teeter on the brink of surrealism. Which is not surprising really, because he professed in an earlier interview admiration for painters that were the collective embodiment of the whole surrealist ethos---like Hieronymous Bosch, Salvador Dali, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and Sergio Aragones.

Let's take his painting "Dream Goddess" (above) as a case in point. Monnar's art here is at its most erotic. The dream goddess of the title is the fantasy figure that haunts males (the white pen doodles in the painting) in their sleep. The goddess could be any unattainable female any male is obsessed with in his waking state. Her all-encompassing figure suggests that she is larger than life and is therefore not real. But no matter. Her mere presence in a male's dream provide a release for the unrequited obsessions that bothers him while awake.

The "Dreamcatcher" on the other hand refers to a fictive entity who 'edits' a person's dream. The dreamcatcher is a friend for he/she allowed only good dreams to occur. Bad dreams, which are nightmares really, are deleted, filtered, or caught in a net, where they stay until the light of day zapped them out completely. 

Monnar got his inspiration for this painting from objects common among Native Americans---particularly the Ojibwe tribe who originated them. Dreamcatchers are net or web-like objects hung over the the bed of sleeping persons, and used as charm  to protect them from nightmares.

Two other paintings, "Rapid Eye Movement" and "Wandering Mind", depict in concrete images the journey the subconscious takes in dreamland.. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is the phase when the sleeper has the propensity to dream vividly. This phase is characterized by the random movement of the eyes. Ubiquitous in the Rapid Eye Movement painting are sticks on the tip of which are attached orbs that look like eyeballs fringed with sunflower petals. Monnar revealed that they are in fact eyeballs that popped out of the sleepers' eye sockets, hinting at their frenzied activity and three-dimensionality.  In this painting, Monnar proposed that during REM, the sleeper's eyes do wander and see things that seem real.

In the painting Wandering Mind, however,  it is the mind who wanders and encounters and absorbs ideas, concepts, and logical solutions the mind can't come up with when awake.

In his present collection, Monnar utilized new techniques in his art making. They are no longer just two-dimensional paintings in acrylic. They are now an amalgam of low relief collages, acrylic paintings, and pastel and white pen drawings. The dream goddess and sun motifs, for example, are hardboard cut-outs glued onto the canvas.

As mentioned before, prior to coming up with this collection, Monnar was very much into doing 'happy paintings' which he averred were manifestations of his lighter side and flexibility, and his willingness to set aside angst for a while. But it looks as if that period in his artistic life was just temporary for he now returns to the visionary themes that he's truly comfortable with and used to tackle in his very early works. 

Monnar graduated from the University of the East in 1989 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree major in Advertising. He ignored serious painting for several years, and worked as graphic artist and later on as Art Director for the magazine Woman Today. He also did comic strips on the side for newspapers and Glitter Magazine. He is working for sixteen years now as Design Director for Women's Journal Magazine.

(This essay is the exhibition notes I wrote for Monnar Baldemor's 2016 solo show at the Artologist Gallery.)