Gary Carsley

The future, or so Ilya Nabakov would have us believe, is nothing more than the obsolete in reverse. More and more, representations of the present are shaped by the formal and stylistic attributes of those from the past. Music, Fashion, Literature, Cinema and Art are currently characterised by a trans-historicism that pervades, all manner, or in the case of Marikit Santiago, all femanner of images. It is not so much that time has been wound back, but that time as it was understood during the centuries leading up to the advent of the Internet, simply no longer exists. The concept of time as lineal and moving continuously forward has been replaced by one in which all time is concurrent expressed through the interlacing, in art and life, of what were previously separated and successive historical moments.

In 2005, Thomas Freedman the New York Times columnist and 3 times Pulitzer Prize winner published a short history of the 21^st century titled The World Is Flat. In the popular imagination, the last time the world was flat was in the medieval epoch. In The World Is Flat Freedman analyses a range of factors contributing to (and caused by) globalisation and arrives at the flat world as a metaphor evocative of the great leveling out that he describes as globalisations defining trait. A lot has changed since 2005. The World Is Flat has been updated, revised and reissued numerous times, while inequality, environmental degradation and organised violence against women and minorities have all accelerated exponentially. Marikit grew to adulthood, went to art school and did very well. She married Shawn and together they made Maella, who was named after her great-grandfather Ismael.

Many of these things – the current condition of the world, the love between her, Shawn and their families are among the subjects making up the exhibition Altar Ego. The figures in the paintings are easy to identify; if you know Marikit, you will be able to distinguish Josefina, Shawn and Maella. If you have knowledge of high-level sport will also recognise Manny Pacquiao, the first and only 8-division world-boxing champion. That you can determine who the individuals are within the paintings means that they are skilfully executed representations; even when veiled behind a heavy mantilla of geometric sgraffito, we can quickly ascertain who they are and guess at what they mean to the artist. The capacity to render out of nothing but observation and paint the semblance of another remains one of those great, abiding mysteries of art. Inexplicable and allusive, skill can be augmented, refined even amplified by training but if you don’t have it, no amount practice is going to realise it out of mere effort. Images like these require ability and patience. This means painting for Marikit can be partially understood as a meditative act, like prayer, which returns us to the title of the exhibition Altar Ego and my evocation of Neo-Medievalism.

Adobo is both a dish and a cooking process, in the same way in which a painting is both an image and the expression of a concept. Adobo is often considered the national dish of the Philippines. Typically pork or chicken slowly cooked in vinegar and spices, its original name is lost to time and the colonial habit of overwriting indigenous histories with those of the conquistadors. Vinegar is the most readily available mild acid and if we consider it literarily and not literally, it also helps us define something of the artist’s intentionality. There is direct and unflinching steel behind the rich velvet eyes that confront the viewer. Their gaze evidences a refreshing lack of the supine gratitude which beige Australia solicits (as the price for entry) from the newer members of its civic family. This whiff of vinegar is a timely reminder that it is we who should be grateful for the diversity and sophistication multiculturalism has brought to what was and in many places still is, a provincial culture of almost overwhelming mediocrity and inauthenticity.

Principal among the formal properties of medieval painting is a flattened, shallow picture space, often heavily ornamented and richly patterned. Gold, either in leaf or emulsion was frequently applied as a signifier of the richness spirituality brings to life. It is against this characteristic background that the figures in medieval painting and in Altar Ego are strongly delineated. They float like decals. In a strange way these processes result in objectification of the subject; setting up a feedback loop in which the past and the present meet in a future perfect. If the impending is the past in reverse, than painting as an act is not anachronistic, but rather anachronic: both in and outside time. Welcome to tomorrow, today.

© 2015 Gary Carsley

This essay accompanies images of works by Marikit Santiago in the exhibition catalogue.

Marikit Santiago