At Underground Gallery, Four Artists Reckon with the Aesthetics of Commerce

Art and Design

Nov 17

Diversity allows for a range of expressions, from narratives about the sea and movement to apocalyptic renderings of cityscapes.

Written by Sean Carballo
November 17, 2023

In the eighties, the American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, known for her provocative text art and large-scale installations, established a large electronic sign at Times Square. It bore the words “Protect me from what I want.” A kind of anti-advertisement, Holzer’s words burned through the screen, bringing audiences into an awareness about capitalist culture’s unceasing churn of desire and want.

At Underground Gallery in Makati City, a group show deploys Holzer’s words as a way to interrogate the relationship between the artistic and the commercial. Similarly titled Protect Me From What I Want, the show features the work of four artists whose practices cut across the fields of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. This diversity allows for a range of expressions, from narratives about the sea and movement to apocalyptic renderings of cityscapes.

In Mark Salvatus’s Scratching series, the artist navigates the transient fault lines which encompass Manila. Cracks and glitches condition the imagery of his paintings, recalling the fissures of the city as well as the bustling traces of movement. There is an unpredictability to these paintings as colors break away and lines transmutate. Strange forms—fidgety and decentered—come alive in the process.

Elsewhere, Bunny Cadag and Jon Cuyson explore notions of water, labor, and sculpture in their works. The former negotiates a soft trans femininity alongside the tense and embittered motions of the sea. Using materials like driftwood, pearl beads, rhinestones, and tulle, Cadag shapeshifts objects into sources of divinity. Likewise, Cuyson deploys materials like sewn canvas and painting surfaces composed of layers of paint, all of which were selected from the mall. These materials compose his S.O.S series, one of which features encased jasperstone and a plastic helmet.

The aesthetics of commerce fill these works with a kind of irony. The act of looking, the show suggests, is one that cannot be divorced from the act of consumption. Cadag’s wondrously malformed and bejeweled sculptures appear as extravagant designs compared to Cuyson’s more homespun renderings. And yet both feel attuned to the way consumption renders art as objects, things to be calculated and priced.

Most explicitly, Lena Cobangbang’s works showcase mall culture as a site of endless change. “Render Unto Seizure” brings to the foreground two watercolor works in white box frame with LED strip lights. “SER/VICES,” one reads. “Growing for the future,” another one reads, which she once saw from a signage in a desolate mall in Ottawa. The visual confusion of these works paired with the embroidered text is an uncanny juxtaposition, both welcoming and alienating at the same time. Like most of the show, Cobangbang’s work treads the line between an embrace and a critique of consumerism, reflecting a fragmented desire grounded on the soft yet insidious powers of capitalism.