Jonathan Olazo’s cryptically titled The Ballad Phantasmagoria by Judas Bear Loves Über Bear comes across like the artist’s attempt to lose his viewers in a smoke screen of mixed metaphors and a brand of pseudo-hyper-meta-fiction with a nonchalant ‘see-what-you-can-make-of-this-mess’ swagger. Yet as indecipherable as the title may read, the components of his installation seem thoroughly sorted out.

Conveniently appropriating a previously installed triangular surface on the front corner of the gallery wall, the space is converted into an immense camera obscura. He utilizes this as a film screen upon which to project the image of a rocking chair with the word zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the time’ superimposed over it. Like a painting in the recesses of a deep cavern, the dark chamber suggests a descent into the underworld and evokes the aura of a shamanistic ritual—or Jonathan’s descent into the belly of the whale—where the artist grapples with the subconscious in the constant search for the source of his artistic impetus: that indefinable absence or longing.

The text itself is equivocally hackneyed and profound, maybe even pretentious—a word you’d only come across in art theory class—yet it holds enough gravity and relevance to suspend you in its orbit. The rocking chair, it turns out, has its own fixed autobiographical resonance; the artifact belongs to his father, a prominent figure in Philippine art. Wrestling with the Freudian dilemma as most artists must, Olazo the Younger compounds his predicament by adopting a secondary father figure in the person no less than Roberto Chabet, a dominating figure in the Philippine art scene, thus heightening his Oedipal crisis exponentially. The imagery could then be read either as a nod to his flighty incursions as an ‘armchair conceptual artist’ or as a self-critique on the laid back passive-aggressive.

The gallery’s small room, like a foreboding closet, is stockpiled with an array of the artist’s past works rummaged from his studio—a virtual armory that suggests that if the singular image in the gallery is not enough, there is more where it came from. In fact, the room inventories an overwhelming visual barrage that displays his diverse repertoire of postmodern aesthetics to address any ideology and to suit any occasion. Perhaps as an act of overcompensation, it seems to want to say the last word on installation art—in the local scene at least. Amidst the  quiet chaos of this stockroom is a stack of canvases from different phases of a relatively long career: from the early thick, icing-like impastos on canvas to the ‘accidentally’ stained surfaces, and torn, weather-beaten tarps; they invariably allude to the carnality of painting.

Another series of small canvases bound together, flailing like deflated balloons or a medieval flagellum, can be seen as an intermediary piece between his canvases and installation pieces, including his more-familiar light boxes. Also littered in the room are facsimiles of the abandoned toys of youth—archaeological relics that delve into the artist’s formative psyche.

Included in the clutter of curious objects is an actual skeleton in the closet as it were, displaying his penchant for deliberate or incidental visual puns. Nowhere is this more manifest than in his unlit neon tube that reads bayag, or scrotum. Ostensibly an offhand text to amuse or upset the viewer’s sensibilities, the work is essentially a self-reflexive inquiry on whether the artist has the balls or if his cocky display endows him with one. 

This somehow sums up the ambiguity of Olazo’s approach to his craft. His constant assertions and contradictions recur like a motif. Though constantly grasping at elusive truths, he seems perfectly at ease and in his element in the realm of uncertainty. Ambiguity thus becomes a calculated subversion and obliviousness—a method of liberation. His studied impulsiveness maintains a tenuous balance that prevents the viewer from being condemned to a series of perpetual loops, dead ends, and false starts.

The exhibition comes with Olazo’s inscrutable note that sardonically posits that possibilities are infinite, granted no one is sure what is being talked about. His random, rambling manifesto seems to taunt Philippine art criticism’s academic excesses and its tendency to speak in alien tongues. At the same time, it reflects on the artist’s own uncertainties and personal anxieties regarding his position in this small, backwater art constellation and assesses his own worth—how much is divined by virtue of the purity of Sir Galahad’s errantry and how much is a result of his charmed life? One piece that is very easy to overlook in the repository provides a clue to this convoluted, self-inflicted predicament. Written on a scrap of manila envelope is the familiar calligraphic scribbling of his second paternal figurehead, which reads, ‘…all bullshit cannot save art from meaning…’ In the end, like an inevitable appointment in Samarra, no amount of gamesmanship or intricate schemes can extricate art from itself.

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