The Pop-Surrealist Sensei

 

Essay 44. The Pop-Surrealist Sensei

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

ROGER "RISHAB" TIBON is an ardent lover of nature. That sentiment shows in his art. But not for him is the conventional depictions of nature in the manner of the Amorsolo school. Tibon employs a contemporary pop-surrealist approach in his paintings which is mildly disturbing if one isn't aware of its allegorical purpose. His usage of fantastic imagery is merely his way of bringing his advocacy in step with the times.

One Tibon painting that's disturbingly mysterious is his portrait of a man with a face dotted by poker card patterns like hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs. In lieu of hair, this man flaunts a luxuriant growth of sea fan corals atop his head. Completing the composition are images of a seahorse, lantern fish, seaweeds, and sea anemones. I could have easily identified this man as Tibon's interpretation of a contemporary Neptune or sea god, but the image of a rooster - even if not so conspicuous - and the white roses on the man's suit prevented me from doing so. Complementing this work is Tibon's s superbly painted androgynous-looking "human" that must be a mythic undersea-dweller too, donning a jellyfish hood topped by two nautilus horns.

Paintings of children always elicit  warm responses from viewers. Tibon's works do too. One painting of his shows a girl wearing a headband with Mickey Mouse ears and a Donald Duck extension of her mouth. Another painting is of an infant who is apparently 

an aquatic denizen, because flitting around him is a fighting fish and a koi. Both of those paintings are charming, but not more so than Tibon's painting of a baby owl looking out the hole window of their treehouse. Now, this baby owl painting and that portrait of what I supposed as a contemporary sea god are indicative of the theme that enamored Tibon, for these paintings are composites of images of creatures of both forest and sea, implying the inherent connectivity of all living things.

Tibon was born in June,1960, in Aklan. He moved to Cebu and Manila years later, and in 1990 settled for good in Baguio City. Tibon was an installation and performance artist, a graphic designer, an advertising art director, and a filmmaker. He dabbled in poetry once and is a "sensei", or master, of the Filipino martial art, arnis. It was in Baguio that Tibon got acquainted with National Artist Benedicto 'Bencab' Cabrera, who encouraged him to devote himself to painting full time.. 

Tibon had joined an art biennial and sculpture festival, group art exhibitions and art fairs, an art environmental project, and art residency programs in various places in Asia, and in Australia, Italy, Mexico, and the USA. Proof of Tibon's growing reputation in the Philippine art scene was his winning prizes in several AAP art competitions and in the Philippine Art Awards. Aside from those, Tibon also won the Grand Prize in the Green Cordillera Painting Competition, the First Prize in the Baguio Painting Competition, a 'Gawad Urian Award' for Best Production Design in Films, and the Lyra Award for the Shadow Play Competition at the Third World Delphic Games in Jeju, South Korea.

With a list of achievements as long as that, we shouldn't be surprise when we hear one day Tibon's name uttered with the same awe as Bencab's, and his masterpieces elevated to the same status that Bencab's works enjoy.