INTONARUMORI: A THREE-PART EXPLORATION OF CHAOS, MUTATION, AND THE GROTESQUE
Intonarumori, is a 3 person exhibition bringing together the uncompromising visions of: Romeo Lee, MM Yu, and Manuel Ocampo. Taking its name from the Futurist noise-generating instruments of Luigi Russolo, Intonarumori (meaning “noise makers”) presents a symphony of dissonance, celebrating the chaotic frequencies of identity through painting, photography, and the grotesque.
Intonarumori transforms the gallery into a laboratory of collision. Here, the mystical and the mutative, the documentary and the delirious converge. The three artists, each working in distinct formal languages, are united by a shared commitment to embracing the “noise”—the visual, political, and spiritual static that defines life in the contemporary Philippines. They do not seek to quiet the racket, but to amplify it, revealing the strange harmonies hidden within the static.
Romeo Lee presents his figurative paintings as artifact from an apocalypse already underway. His canvases are populated by what he calls “mutants”—figures evolved in response to the twin pressures of colonial aftermath and global consumerism. Voluptuous, defiant nudes rise from ash-strewn vistas like primordial earth mothers, while his iconic Hello Kitty Mutant series corrupts the symbol of sanitized cuteness, fusing it with military hardware and industrial waste. Lee’s work is a funhouse mirror reflecting the “beautiful wreckage” of a world where survival demands distortion. “My paintings are not warnings,” Lee states. “The apocalypse is not coming; it is here, and it is us. We are the mutants, living and loving in the beautiful, broken shadow of a Hello Kitty sun.”
MM Yu offers a counterpoint of quiet observation amidst the cacophony. Her practice—a constant act of “walking and looking”—documents the “graceful imperfection” of Manila’s urban landscape. Through her lens, contradictory signages (“bawal umihi dito” on perpetually wet walls) become poetry, and piles of garbage transform into complex color-field compositions. Paired with her recent series of drip paintings—where she surrenders control to gravity and time—Yu’s photographs capture the “devious dirty charm” of a city that negotiates its own survival through improvisation and wit. Her work finds the sublime in the accidental, the humorous in the bureaucratic, and the sacred in the everyday wreckage. “I am not creating new truths,” says Yu, “but simply framing the ones that are already there, patiently waiting to be seen.”
Manuel Ocampo, debuts his latest series, “The Sobbing Shell.” Here, Ocampo fixates on a singular, sorrowful archetype: a clown, rendered in stark, memorializing profile. Born not of the sea but from the fractured calcification of an eggshell—a direct perversion of Botticelli’s Venus—this figure is a cartography of contradiction. With a distended belly, a bottle as his primary solace, and a syringe plunged into his exposed flesh (upon which a crow perches as witness), the clown embodies the spectacle of public suffering and private depletion. The derby hat and round nose are hollow forms, props that violently contrast with the raw, injected reality of the body. “The Sobbing Shell” is a profound meditation on addiction, performance, and the violence inflicted upon the body by a society that consumes anguish as entertainment.
Curated as a single immersive experience, Intonarumori positions the gallery as a resonating chamber for these three distinct voices. Lee’s apocalyptic mutants scream from the walls, Ocampo’s clowns sob in profile, and Yu’s photographs quietly capture the resulting debris and her drip paintings conveys ethereal decay of paint as it bleeds gracefully down the city’s weathered skin. Together, they form a portrait of a nation perpetually negotiating its own survival—a place where beauty and horror are inseparable, and where the only honest response to the noise is to make some of your own.
Works
MM Yu & Romeo Lee - Punklee
MM Yu & Romeo Lee - Doctor Wash
MM Yu & Romeo Lee - Love
MM Yu & Romeo Lee - Pay Parking
MM Yu & Manuel Ocampo - Candle Drips
MM Yu & Manuel Ocampo - Finis Terrae (World's End)
MM Yu & Manuel Ocampo - Skeleton Sausage
MM Yu & Manuel Ocampo - Cockroach
MM Yu & Manuel Ocampo - Three Blind Mice
Romeo Lee & Manuel Ocampo - Snake & Birds
Romeo Lee & Manuel Ocampo - The Blue Skeleton
Romeo Lee & Manuel Ocampo - The Pink Cat
Romeo Lee & Manuel Ocampo - White Cat
Manuel Ocampo - Reunion
Manuel Ocampo - The Noisemakers
Manuel Ocampo - The Sobbing Shell 1
Manuel Ocampo - The Sobbing Shell 2
Manuel Ocampo - The Sobbing Shell 3
Manuel Ocampo - The Sobbing Shell 4
Manuel Ocampo - The Sobbing Shell 5
Manuel Ocampo - The Sobbing Shell 6
MM Yu - After Signs
MM Yu - Sorry For The Inconvenience
MM Yu - Misc
MM Yu - Flytrap
MM Yu - Bawal Standby Dito
MM Yu - Bawal
MM Yu - Rainbow Land
MM Yu - Bear
MM Yu - Buy One Take One
MM Yu - Colored Mountain
MM Yu - Collage
MM Yu - Tree Grid
MM Yu - No End
MM Yu - Vomit
MM Yu - CatDog
MM Yu - Either/Or
MM Yu - Not
MM Yu - Jesus Hands
MM Yu - Untitled Rat
MM Yu - Ipis 1
MM Yu - Ipis 2
MM Yu - No End (Pineapple Ipis)
MM Yu - No End (Unbuilt)
MM Yu - No End (Gas)
MM Yu - Noisemakers
MM Yu - Untitled Pantone 1
MM Yu - Untitled Pantone 2
MM Yu - Untitled Pantone 3
MM Yu - If You Could Hear A Pin Drop
MM Yu - Measures 1
MM Yu - Measures 2
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled (Blue Nude)
Romeo Lee - Untitled (Green Made)
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled (Nude)
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled (Nude)
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Sisterlee
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled (Pink)
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Manlee
Romeo Lee - Christian Leeving
Romeo Lee - Familee
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled (Violet Tree)
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - It
Romeo Lee - Fat Nude
Romeo Lee - Dog
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Untitled (Owls)
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Hello Kitty
Romeo Lee - Untitled
Romeo Lee - Shit
Documentation
