There is no one;

Just desolate places and vacant objects seemingly caught into that which bears semblance to an eternal standstill, but there is movement – almost indiscernible like a slight shift in shadows, a looming downpour, a hushed rustling of paper, of leaves, a distant cricket chirping – in Renato Barja Jr.’s Together in the Empty. 

These places and objects exist in their own individual realms, wasting away in rhythm with the slow ticking of their own clocks. Perhaps that is how the artist saw them in the sidelines on his solitary walks, his bicycle rides; perhaps the artist is projecting too much of himself towards his surroundings, giving in to the human desire for kinship, and finding it in unlikely subjects. After all, the experience of loss knows no end.

The common tendency is to remedy loss with company, but Barja has chosen isolation, retreating deeper and deeper into himself, away from the exhausting reminders of why he has chosen to seclude himself in the first place. 

Together in the Empty may seem like a continuance of Barja’s previous exhibition New Departure (2017), but it comes from a different perspective. In Together in the Empty, Barja talks of the insignificance of a person’s existence to a place – his beliefs, history, all the things and experiences he has deemed significant is in no way of importance to the place he happens to be in.  One may assert that people and places are in a symbiotic relationship, but who really benefits? People are sentimental beings; they get attached to things, to other people; they count each other’s traces scattered down the road, down the years. Places, they just exist, no matter how much they are subjected to progress, to change, to destruction; they will never cease to exist until the time comes for them to disappear with everything else.

The works in Together in the Empty mischievously shroud themselves in a social commentary disguise, bearing titles borrowed from news headlines, to which they don’t relate to in any way. People are always shaken by the news, but these places? They just remain as they are. A rundown nightclub is still the same rundown nightclub when the US has added the Maute to its terror groups list. A kilometer post is still the same kilometer post whether the Museum of Natural History opened itself to the public or not. A playground corner, a smoke from a crematorium, a billboard, a calendar, a slaughterhouse, they remained themselves no matter which mayor is assassinated, no matter how many dies in a landslide, no matter how many lives are expended in the war on drugs.

These may all seem despondent, but it is the reality Barja chooses to see, and what he has chosen to see, he tries to show in Together in the Empty. Most people would want to believe that the world is a sphere of interconnections, essences of existences woven together, interlocking, interacting, interdependent with each other, but a man who has chosen isolation tends to only see the isolation, the separation of things. A man who has chosen isolation sees no one, not even himself.

        –     Marionne Contreras