Dissent Living

Julio San Jose

Dissent Living is a curious window into a post-catastrophic milieu, showing an interesting development in humankind’s culture. It offers its viewers immediate suggestions of destruction, rejection, and backwardness in an organized Dada or what seems like a systematized chaos. This collection of dystopian potentials seeks to interpret man’s future with attributes such as regressed intellects and restful innovativeness. With his artful play on words in dissent (descent) living, Julio San Jose constructs the material culture of a society assumably meeting its logical demise.

Working with visual contrasts, San Jose adheres to minimal straightforwardness in communicating mankind’s absurdities. His still, graphic portrayals carry with them a rather worrying, although surrealistically amusing, weight which speak about man’s naturally wavering dispositions. In his wall-bound works, the artist delineates the inane sequences of various material productions—from suggesting bad ideas to forming even worse outputs. Lightly referencing the seriousness and direction of user manuals, San Jose’s irrational examples maintain a level of formality and calmness—reconciling logical organization and man’s grandiose retarding thought. Co-operating with these wall-bound visuals are the artist’s lively scale models displaying more concretely the relationship between man and environment. Departing from another formal medium, San Jose alludes to architectural proposals to manifest the eccentric customs in an unnamed dystopia. From demonstrating how the hollow of a swimming pool can replace one’s everyday fireplace to displaying how a poorly engineered structure continues to be developed flukily regardless, San Jose offers a vivid look into a new wave of man’s values.

For the longest time, mankind’s civilization had been institutionally recommended to maintain itself in its prime: cultured, intelligent, and progressive (are some characteristics). In this consideration, San Jose puts forward a more lighthearted, with tinges of comic pessimism, illustration of man’s cultural break and rejection. His depiction of society’s problematic response to what seems like a civility decline is in itself a recognition and quiet celebration of man’s fascinating humanness in an unpredictable epilogue; perpetuating humanity even at its most irrational, weird, perhaps humorous, and almost distressing, creative peak.

—Vianca Delacruz