The title is derived from a song by Vampire Weekend, a New York-based indie band that Louie was listening to while preparing for the show. The exact lines are the last strains from the song “One (Blake’s Got A New Face)”: “Oh, your collegiate grief has left you dowdy in sweatshirts / Absolute horror!” The very lyrics echo a preppy mood quite sophomoric in melancholic sentiment soddened by unrequited infatuations, overwhelming responsibility, and the whole I-hate-the-world-the-world-hates-me shtick. It’s not so surprising that a lot of slasher flicks, rock music, and fantasy / gore comics target such a demographic. They lap it up by the popcorn-ful, for they rely upon such things as oracles to their isolated teenage desperation. Yet the initial thrills shield them from the real-life horror of surviving life—like paying bills, cleaning one’s own toilet, filing income tax returns, and making aging parents feel that they’re still very much appreciated.

Medieval life was fret with paranoia, but the paranoia they felt was as palpable as death itself knocking on their doorstep. Lacking the modern implements for self-preservation and easily swayed by the sweeping compositions of the end-of-times—fiery sermons from the pulpits of recluse friars fearful of their own fate in the face of a massive plague—the lyrics of heavy metal songs vainly recreate the same harrowing mood in a rather hi-theatre, baroque shrillness. Their lyricism is amazingly as vivid as the medieval etchings and prints found on prayer books, some inserted in-between recipe books: both propose allegorical symbolisms to the inevitable fate of man, where man falls and where salvation can be found. Virtue and vice are personified as virginal angels and malicious devils, respectively. Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, or alternately with Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, is a persistent stand-bearer for this kind of damnation that both medieval art and metal preach and screech about: an unworldly horror anxiously anticipated with death.

Cordero’s three-piece “Smash, the Cool (death by the most holistic influential utopian goals) Nos. 1, 2, and 3” seem to illustrate the parallel experience of death-like trances in apocalyptic visions evoked in metal music and allegorical symbolisms; yet, the rather naïve allusions are typified by the imbibed sense of aesthetics of jeepney artists / designers, particularly those from the small clique of drivers-artists plying the route of San Mateo-Montalban-Cubao. Each panel, painted flatly with acrylic, are leaning on the walls, their bottoms inserted in the mid-section of fiberglass figures, all tattooed and wearing black shirts emblazoned with logos of hard rock / metal bands such as Motörhead, Scorpions, and Guns N’ Roses. The motifs on each panel are those usually found on jeepneys. Cordero further narrates a cult-like ritual being performed by these airbrush artists—going up the nearby mountains of Montalban, Rizal, drinking gin while painting, heavy metal music blaring loud for the whole process. The result of this is their fully-customized speed wagons blazing down Marcos Highway, a seeming road to either heaven or hell or wherever you prefer your ride home. The mirror symmetry of how these panels are composed is not so much derived from a mindful memorization of the laws of balance, but rather from mimicking the sincere attempts to perfection by self-taught artisans, or as prescribed by the conventions of heraldry-making. The very history of heraldry-making itself carries with it its own secretive system of codes. If it can be recalled, the Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion album cover bore a bit of controversy when it was purported that the image was taken from a part of Raphael’s “School of Athens” fresco painting—a boy reading a book resting on one of his raised thighs, its mirror image revealed instead the same boy eating his own leg.

This, and the alleged back-masked sounds of heavy metal tapes purported to contain chants invoking Satan, stoked fire to their enigmatic charm; most especially for those who are constantly seeking signposts of sureness and redemption, when orthodox rituals become too much of a chore or are too much a reminder of an authority figure they’re much averse to, i.e. crone aunts and preachy priests. However, much of this secret-meaning-making renders them obsolete as well, especially in light of rationality; the metal-shirted figures, plunged dead with their over-bearing symbols, being other than arbitrary supports for these panels.

Visionaries may not always reveal what they know or claim to know, however lucidly they describe the things they claim to have seen. All the more, it gets murky: the entangled connections between concepts and images get to be more frustratingly knotted, more veiled in fog and shadow. This is probably the reason why it’s deemed futile to have complete, detailed explanations of such images. The very trivial elements bear as much gravity as the overall picture. Every color and every line points to a specificity; there also lies its very enigmatic presence. William Blake’s turbulent life colored much of his highly imaginative prints. His consideration of his artistry is primarily based on the beliefs he staunchly advocated with his prints. Ultimately, his drawings and paintings of demons, angels, beasts, and the underworld are synonymously termed as his visions of them. They are as mystical as the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven,” yet as influential as ever, like cough syrup and asceticism on the other extreme.

In Cordero’s “The Individual (Flock of Wrongs),” the aesthetic guidelines of so-called visionaries become central to its very composition. A kneeling figure in white oxfords is praying to a giant idol reminiscent of Alex Gray’s visionary 2D, plastinated new-agers in yoga trance. Behind this figure with exposed anatomy is a row of paintings copied from the website of The Museum of Bad Art. Rizalista symbols add to the surfeit of esoteric popism via the Masonic pyramid and the brown-robed priestess. The exposed anatomy can hardly be possessed of the ‘Divine Imagination’ as subscribed to by Blake and Grey, as the figure looks more like a Stonehenge mummy with its flesh petrified in a solution of formaldehyde, face as dumb-looking as a puppet; the ritual depicted may as well be manipulated by strings. Hence, there is no real mystical event. A dose of DMT will instead push the shove to belief.

The figure with exposed innards is further employed in a number of paintings in the same show: in “The Lead Brothers,” in “The Liberation,” and in “Phantom Power.” The intent may be a parody of visionary artist Alex \ Grey, who largely banked on exposed anatomies as products of his peyote-induced hallucinations, but that too is a mere assumption. Their meaty solidness is more of a throwback to the ‘meatball and spaghetti’ style of cartoonist Basil Wolverton, who emerged in the post-WWII era of canned convenience. This is none the more apparent in “The Gaze,” where a meatball of multi-color brains propped on a gray pedestal poses in profile, a lit cigarette jutting out from below its gigantic, straining eyeball. The red-brick-wall background, a compositional device, later becomes an allusion to Pink Floyd’s album cover for The Wall, its carrier single made into a short film that shows school kids being ground into meat in assembly-line mode, reiterates the meatball form. Michael Jackson, in his pre-cosmetic surgery days, deceptively brandishes a similar title for his album Off the Wall, where he’s posing betuxed against a brick wall. Decades after, he skinned off his naturally dark pigment to turn himself into a bleached ghost with a melting nose—a hybrid pop phenomenon, a freak of surgeons, a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster.

Monsters frequently embody a personified fear. The mixed physiognomy arises from the need for these monsters to be terrible-looking, at the same time, to place them outside the norm. They’re usually typified by the green mutant and the proverbial mermaid in “Cloud Panic.” Two impaled, bearded heads with mouths gaping open revealing fangs and tongue stand guard in this seeming scene of species interbreeding between mutant and mythical nymph. An unlikely mix is this copulation: a classical muse with the dregs of thermonuclear testing, the surefire formula of shock kitsch—romanticism and grotesquerie. But do they remain as easy equations for Eros and Thanatos? Or do they merely fuel sad bad rock ballads or sequel-smashing pulp fests? Alas, the formulated outsider extreme has become the norm for such.

If styles are mimicked for the effect of surface, the very personification of those who practice such are not so different from zombies. Do outsiders feel that way about their practice? In an act of reversal, it’s themselves that they are mining for their untouched throve of pure imaginings by academically-taught artists. Cordero admits to an admiration for such, and had been as of late looking up to billboard painters, folk artists, tattoo shop artisans, mall portraitists, deft forgers of bootlegged discs and cassette tapes for renewed inspiration. Could “The Origins of Man,” the 10-piece high-relief portraits of painted zombie heads be his trophy homage of them? Or are they hanging as unwitting sacrificial lambs, their heads at ease on the chopping block?

Nonetheless, depending on the panache and bravura of execution, it still becomes a spectacular event in an eye-popping, hair-standing-on-end way, as illustrated by such pieces like “C.O.B.R.A. (Mystics Reign Science Fails).” The drooping eyeballs in this piece have yet to be jolted out of their overbearing gravity: to be played the flute for, drawing the piece out of its plush cradle of over-analysis.

The zombie of modernism, the so-undead practice of painting, is continually revived as a postmodern monster who feeds upon everything it sees on its path, including its very creator. This continual consumption will eventually leave nothing—no one to witness the cataclysmic apocalypse. And that will be the absolute horror of all.

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