This series was conceived during a tropical storm that swept through my hometown last year. Strong winds had left a thick accumulation of debris on the roof of my studio, blocking the drain, causing water to leak through the ceiling and walls, eventually flooding the ground floor, where some canvas pieces were laid out flat. I thought of the water as both cleansing and erosive as it seeps into things, eroding the most delicate parts, while leaving the more permanent and enduring portions untouched. I decided to continue what nature had already set in motion by unfurling a few rolls of old painted canvas portions across the expansive roof of the house. Days of exposure to the heavy downpour, as well as other elements pressing against the galvanized roofing, left a massive imprint on the sheets, where some of the paint had been loosened and abraded, leaving a roughly textured, worn surface in its wake. 

Bautismo is the Filipino word for “baptism,” the ritual washing performed in many Judeo-Christian denominations, usually accompanied by the bestowment of a name. Like most infants born in the Philippines, I was ceremonially sprinkled with water and christened with a Christian name. At the same time, baptism also describes the idea of being initiated into a difficult process. 

Throughout history, when human beings would struggle for identity, dignity, and essential worth, it would often be in the defense of name and personhood. The Romans deemed slaves as “non habens personam”—not having a persona, or more literally, not having a face. By law, they were faceless, nameless, sub-human; even craftsmen, such as woodworkers, manual laborers who were known as “tekton,” were on the lowest rungs of society. The Nazis used a similar term—Untermensch (literally, underman or subhuman)—to describe the non-Aryan, “inferior masses from the East.” Paradoxically, baptism in Christian scriptures publicly identified a believer with Jesus, a carpenter who claimed to be God in the flesh. He dignified the oppressed by suffering torture and execution at the hands of the religious and political leaders alongside a long line of criminals and nameless, faceless “subhumans.”

Bautismo, the exhibit, is a continuation of my existing practice of exploring damage-based modes of production, creating work that is weathered, beaten, distressed, and using the physical language of painting (brushstrokes, manipulated  surfaces, selected hues) to come up with a portrait. My aim is to highlight nature’s inherent tendency to move from an ordered state towards disintegration as it struggles to retain its form. In this series, using water as a starting point, I reflect on identity and essential worth through portraits rendered on collaged fragments gathered from strips of weathered rooftop fabrics. The owners of the faces are based on average middle class workers, modern-day “tektons”—a watchman, a teacher, musicians, painters, mothers, fathers, cooks.  The act of rendering the faces ennobles these people, deeming them worthy of notice. Simultaneously, it is also an anthropomorphism illustrating nature’s resistance against decay, an allusion to the Hebrew verse “I have set my face like a flint,” showing strength in the face of opposition.