Kim Hamilton Sulit in “A Hammer Inside the Chest”  

by Richard R. Gappi

Kim Hamilton C. Sulit, 27, is a modernist and one of the most experimental contemporary painters in the Philippines.  Hailing for Angono, the art capital of country, Sulit’s interest in the arts started when he was a child.  The catalyst was when he saw artworks of National Artist Carlos ‘Botong’ Francisco during an exhibition at the municipal gymnasium as part of honoring his legacy

Sulit has shown at blanc and West Gallery. His works in the previous six solo exhibits since 2013 are those he considers his major works. His solo exhibitions are “Domestic Dusk” in 2017; “In Times of Solitude” in 2016, “Constant Encounter” and “Walking Through Darkness’ in 2015,  “Haunted” in 2014 and ‘Dancing in the Shadow in 2013.

For his latest 7th solo exhibit entitled “A Hammer Inside the Chest,” Sulit meditates between fear and anxiety as a reflexive sphere of death, which dominates his previous works.

In “Resemblance of Yesterday 1-3,” Sulit uses as reference iconic works such as “St. Andrew” “Icarus” and “St. Sebastian” as he examines the shared and dreadful experience of the uncertainties of life like suffering, sadness and downfall. Here, Sulit departs from the previously held meaning of his appropriated image by erasing or darkening the face to suggest that these uncertainties consume the faceless and nameless, thus enabling the actual viewer to re-fill, reshape and individualize the visual void and its meaning.

The states of being, becoming and ending is explored in “Undesirable Tension 1-3” in which fear dwells constantly within an individual, thus creating and spreading it on his personal psyche and eventually the social sphere. The images of human beings decrease in number and eventually appear like ghosts, with their heads and other body parts melting and dissolving in dense gloom.

The “Momentary Episode 1-3” paintings use as reference, works of previous artists to highlight the random thoughts as byproducts of unexplainable fear. The portrait conjures a memoriam of the beauty of life, on the other hand, the skull image beside it quickly enters the artwork’s piece on the inevitability of death and mortality.  The force of negativity is felt after experiencing excessive pain and intrusive thoughts which were created by internal and external forces.

With its images, color tone and syllogistic presentation, it is tempting to say that Sulit’s artworks send a powerful statement on the state of an individual as a social being who is disturbed and displaced emotionally, psychologically and politically.

There is death through painting: a hammer inside the chest.