I AM FLOWERS | ROLF CAMPOS

It is not a well-known assumption but the assumption is: that a Filipino artist who paints about botany is one who pays tribute to the heritage of our artistry. Rolf Campos is one particular devotee, who has been illustrating and painting flowers since his time in the botany division in the National Museum of Fine Arts. His abiding interest in nature and ecology has led him to study the facsimiles of Juan De Cuellar, a Spanish naturalist, who, during the 18^th century, became part of an expedition in Manila where he hired Filipino illustrators to draw the images of his many botanical discoveries. These illustrated plates depicted numerous plants, flowers, and fruits. It has led to one of the very first coloured publications and historical documents printed locally, the ‘Flora de Filipinas.’ It has also led to some of the very first known paintings by Filipino artists, namely: Miguel de los Reyes, Jose Loden, and Tomas Nazario, the illustrators hired by De Cuellar.

Rolf Campos’ latest solo exhibition is premised as an extension of himself—as the ‘I’ in all flowers. But essentially, it extends to we as well—as part of nature; and as Filipinos, part of this tradition of painting whose origins can be traced back to records of botanical illustrations by artists who preceded Luna, Hidalgo, and even Damian Domingo. Flowers have an important place in Philippine Art History. Flowers, at a certain point in our colonial past, were at the forefront of creativity and artistry.

For this blossom tribute, Campos presents paintings that use acrylic and oil stick as medium. There are seven paintings of flowers in varying sizes—all part of a genus that is from Campos’ own imagination. They come with their own taxonomic names: Familiar Flower, Fearless Flower, First Flower, and Fresh Flower Forever, among others. These are names that highlight the agenda for Campos’ objective in destabilizing tropes of beauty and nature:

“These are all imaginary flowers, with the form (of a bulaklak) broken down into simple shapes and colors.  Colors are directly applied and rarely mixed. And the point is to keep on experimenting with oil paint stick and acrylic—whose combination I truly enjoyed.”

This perceived simplification and reduction into modest shapes of corollas, sepals, and petals that are often recognized as incredibly ornate transform the nature of the flower into the symbolic. They become forms for self-discovery, for re-imagining the seemingly endless permutations of one of nature’s icons of beauty. Although it may appear that the image of flowers here has strong visual ties with the child-like impulse of drawing colorfully, it is in fact a serious commentary against our convoluted and false affectations about art. There is irony involved here, in turning the extravagant, the flowery, into a thing of primordial organisms.

If this is in fact a reference to De Cuellar’s historical ‘Flora de Filipinas’ then why do we get a sense of the primeval? Of the ancient? The flowers presented here may appear as other-worldly, from a distant place, or from an epoch before any known time, which imply a desire to be anti-historical, and anti-scientific. There are enough evidences and visual cues from Campos’ flowers to infer that while they were inspired by the botanist’s expeditions, they are also critiques against the imperial naturalism buoyed by scientific enlightenment and dogmatic rule by our colonial forebears who in the process were successful in excluding their Filipino artists-collaborators.

In Rolf Campos’ declaration of, ‘I am flowers,’ there is also an accompanying question—where does our history lie? In creating his own botanist almanac, we are allowed to imagine—and to discover a plant life that might exist before the convolutions of art and colonialism. One that is as expressive, symbolic, and more connected to the nature of our own imaginations.

/CLJ