‘Everything is still the same. Nothing has really changed.’
Like a Buddhist monk who has journeyed to the edge of the world, Renato L. Barja Jr. answers the questions “What do I do now?” with an exhibition that brings him back to where he began. He turns his back on his beloved cityscape, his ragtag cast of characters—rugby boys and town crazies, butchers and cuckolds—and heads home.
Intimate and introspective, I’m Not There is an ode to loneliness done in Barja’s myriad shades of gray. “Everything is still the same. Nothing has really changed,” he says, with all the nihilism of a man who sits on his couch as the floodwater rises around him.
Barja, included in the shortlist of the 2011 Ateneo Art Awards, examines the idea of helplessness and resignation in three canvases paired with plastic resin sculptures, all of them colored in his distinctively desaturated style. The exhibition’s thematic heaviness is balanced, as ever, by Barja’s naïf treatment.
In Play Dead, an exhausted couple lies slack-jawed and sleeping. Their story is in the details: in the mismatched linen, in the sliver of space between man and woman, in his clasped hands and the slight turn of her body.
The wall-bound sculpture installed beside the slumbering pair offers a different perspective: the man alone—fingers still entwined, head still resting on a blue pillow spangled with stars—escapes into dream, where an astronaut leaps in the landscape of his hair.
Meanwhile, in another work, the mustached artist sits inside his flooded studio. Killing Time Paradise is a self-portrait that has as its background peeling, gray-green walls decorated with painted horizons from the past. His sidelong glance out of the canvas speaks volumes. The slits of his eyes, the heaviness of his lids, and the tight press of his lips convey the idea that there is nothing else he can do.
And so he sits.
And waits.
And protects a little birdhouse that represents what he holds dear in this earthly life.
He cannot even be bothered to get up and unplug an extension cord that is, according to Barja, symbolic of everything—fantasies, desires, wants—that remains unfulfilled.
Killing Time Paradise is a poignant depiction of man’s acceptance of his fate. We are doomed to live, doomed to die. The echo of Barja’s premise—“Everything is still the same. Nothing has really changed.”— bounces off the cracked walls of his dingy studio, a place that is both cage and comfort for the artist.
The striped black-and-white pattern of the man’s sweater is a loaded design reminiscent of prison wear, which Barja repeats in Papa, You Promised to Play. A child, face hidden by a cat mask, wears jailbird pajamas and embraces a Jack Skellington doll from The Nightmare Before Christmas, a dark fantasy kindred to Barja’s moody aesthetic.
The child, alone and accusing (“Papa, You Promised to Play” is a reproach that busy fathers are familiar with), stands before a locked door that hides parental guilt, secrets, and skeletons unfit for innocent eyes.
I’m Not There, like The Jungle & The Rain, is an exhibition that savors melancholy and revels in it. While everything that Barja paints exists in real life, he leaves the interpretation of his evocative canvases to his viewers and more often than not, his work leaves a taste of sadness on the tongue.
Gray-skinned humans—languid, listless, and lethargic—are trapped in lives of their own making. They are shadows haunting spaces that possess more verve and color than they do. Barja’s inanimate world crackles with an energy absent in his zombie-like subjects, who seem to have given up.
“It’s the same shit all over again,” Barja says of life. And all one man can do is get up, paint, and ask himself what to do next.
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