FRANCIS ARNAEZ' PSYCHOLOGICAL DISSECTIONS

By Arnel Mirasol

Painter Francis Arnaez (above) is a storyteller. His paintings are portraits of people whose stories he knew. They are in-depth narratives, a dissection as it were of his sitters' inner selves. Where most people tend to gloss over imperfections, Arnaez does the reverse and mars perfection.

That's what his impastos are for, said Arnaez - to uglify not only his models, but also the very painting itself. An objective this writer sees as not achieved, because the slashes of thick paint he slathers over parts of his model's faces only heightened the expressionist element in his "neo-surrealist" works, and makes them more beautiful, I must say.

Arnaez graduated recently from the Technological University of the Philippines (TUP), where he majored in advertising. He used to work as graphic artist for Wacom before he turned to painting full-time: a decision that's not easy to come by because of his parents' understandable disdain for jobs that don't give one a steady income. But Arnaez is a true artist, a very serious one it seems, because he stresses that he is not particularly interested in the business aspect of art. All he cares for he says is to win the appreciation and critical nod of his peers and other art enthusiasts. Thus, Arnaez isn't afraid to create works which is not of the usual commercial kind. His paintings go deeper than that because they are not meant to be mere adornments. Arnaez' paintings are veritable still theaters of the inner drama, complexes, turmoils, and rage he feels every time he sits in front of his easel.

Doubts on Paradise

Let us take his painting Doubts on Paradise as an example. Arnaez' family live in a house inside a compound somewhere in Ermita. He grew up in that neighborhood, and we can presume that the neighborhood shaped him into the kind of man he had become. Arnaez so loved the place that he came to look at it as some sort of paradise.

But as we all know, paradises are not forever; one gets evicted from it sooner or later. And that exactly was what happened to the Arnaez family. They received a notice from the owners telling them to vacate the place at some specific date. As Francis Arnaez' world crumbled, his painting Doubts on Paradise got created. The painting, a self-portrait, which he started while they were packing their belongings, is a lamentation about the unfairness of fate, and an expression of his latent wish that things stay as they were. Their old place, which once was paradise to him, no longer seem to be so. This would seem like sour-graping, but it is not exactly. That is just Arnaez' instinctive response to mitigate the hurt caused by what he probably interpreted as rejection.

Of the local artists, Arnaez admires Ronald Ventura the most. And rightly so. Arnaez is not the only one who admires him, because nowadays one can see proliferating in the art scene here a plethora of Ventura painting look-alikes. Probably, what many Ventura imitators admire (or envy) most was Ventura's reaching the pinnacle of commercial success despite the undiluted dark surreality of his early works. But Arnaez admires a different aspect of Ventura. He said that he like Ventura not because of his run-away commercial success, but "because of the way he thinks - iba eh."  Arnaez is so right there. And that perhaps is what linked Arnaez to Ventura. Both had the same propensity to tackle profound, and even dark, themes, whose depth and intensity are so scarce in these parts.

The very titles of his paintings (The Flesh is Willing But the Spirit is Weak, Your Spotlight on Subject's So Incorrect, As the Soul Contradicts the Flesh) hinted at something deeper than what the words suggest. From his explanations, I deduced that Arnaez' recurring themes are the inner conflicts that he underwent in this phase of his life when everything is on the balance, and he teeters on the edge of either failure or success. Another recurrent preoccupation is Arnaez'  psychological dissections of his sitters - best exemplified by the painting As the Soul Contradicts the Flesh - which portrays a woman he thought he knew well even before he got acquainted with her, but who turned out to be the opposite of everything he thought her to be. Arnaez' inclusion of slashes of thick paint on both sides of the woman's face was but his attempt to mask the flaws he thought he perceived in the woman's character.

I've gathered in the course of our conversation that Arnaez doesn't care one bit whether his artworks sell or not.  "I believe na hindi dapat gawing business ang art, eh," said Arnaez,  by which he meant, I presume, that artists shouldn't be too obsessed with making artworks that will surely sell. Arnaez is still young, and also single I suppose. He may not be in dire need of money now, but I'm sure that he will be when he faces the task of raising a family. Artists like most people need to eat. And the money their paintings make is what would put food on their tables and paints on their palettes.

But despite Arnaez' low regard for art that is decorative and therefore easy to sell,  Ron and Bambi de Castro, owners of the Artologist Gallery where he showed these paintings recently, obviously believe in the potential of Arnaez to make it big in the art scene. They have no doubt that with the kind of paintings he makes, which appeal not only to the eyes but to the intellect as well, Arnaez would be a run-away commercial success, too - whether he likes it or not.

As the Soul Contradicts the Flesh