Ronson Culibrina (b. 1991)
Behind the Filipina Smile,Every Minute of the Day
signed and dated 2014 (lower right)
oil on canvas
42" x 30" (107 cm x 76 cm)




EXHIBITED1335Mabini, Before Sundown, Makati City,September 20 - October 17, 2014


Ronson Culibrina confronts dynamics in art history in this piece revolving around Fernando Amorsolo’s dalagang bukid. Amorsolo’s depiction of an idyllic countryside scene and ideal native beauty was challenged by the flourishing of modernist art in the country, disputing the conservative and academic concepts regarding aesthetics. According to Lisa Ito in her essay Market Intersections in the Art of Ronson Culibrina, the artists associated with the Amorsolo tradition—the Mabini Art movement—would set up a shop along Mabini Street in Ermita, establishing an inter-generational community in the 1950s that would later be associated with a “commercialized and often lucrative artistic production.” Appropriating Amorsolo’s pastoral setting as a backdrop and the archetypal rural feminine as the main subject, Culibrina borrows elements from Yayoi Kusama’s art, specifically her signature polka dots, replacing Amorsolo’s native flora with Kusama’s polka dot-infused flowers. Kusama has been associated with the same level of commercial success as with the Mabini Art movement, although on a global scale. Ito notes in her essay: “For Amorsolo and the Mabini artists have also represented how Philippine art maintains disparate and interconnected links with the market: from masterpieces of fine art authenticated by connoisseurs and valued at auctions to works produced for the consumption of the mass market, tourists, and expatriates.” Culibrina also explores the contradiction between the conservative and the modern, juxtaposing traditional approaches with contemporary styles. “Populating and altering the once unified vistas and scenery of the Amorsolo and Mabini tradition, the use of pastiche and distortion as forms of visual intervention produces a sense of both dissonance and anxiety in these intersections of the conservative and the contemporary. This practice underscores how something is amiss; how images produced decades apart can fulfill uncannily similar roles and functions as contemporary commodities, circulating in both local and global art contexts,” Ito writes. (A.M.)