Apostle of Art 宗教给他们带来了什么？

Ornate vestments, consecrated objects, baroque stained glass, towering arches. These beautiful facets of the Catholic church are meant to instill awe in worshipers. It certainly enthralled Leslie de Chavez, who’s been attending Sunday services since childhood. “I’ve always been fascinated by religious art,” the Filipino painter says, and his work is heavily imbued with its influences. But as he grew up, so did his understanding of the church’s role in the colonization of the Philippines and the way its visual culture helped empower them. “Colonizers employed beautiful images and luxurious motifs to propagate Catholic faith and reign over the psyche of our people to support the colonial order. They promoted the idea of beauty as equivalent to holiness.”

The gilding methods, glazing techniques and arch-shaped canvases prevalent in de Chavez’s work all point back to Catholic aesthetics. Using these familiar elements, he aims to start a discourse around the contemporary manifestations of the Philippines’ colonization: “Just like how religion utilized art to propagate the Catholic faith, I use these motifs in my paintings to tackle issues affecting our people.”

de Chavez grew up with devoutly religious parents who ran a bicycle shop. Although they weren’t artists, they supported him in his creative endeavors. “They saw to it that we were able to pursue our dreams, despite the contradictions it might incur to their beliefs and wishes,” he says. “They always try to understand the things I do and learn from them.”

At 42 years old, de Chavez continues to attend services with his children and his work reveals a steadfast love for Catholic heritage. Even flaws are cherished in his work: he often simulates the stains, blotches, scratches, paint drops, and even bird poop that he’s seen on the antique paintings and murals adorning Filipino churches.

That appreciation for aged qualities can be also found in his characters’ skin; their dark, weathered complexions almost resemble the textures and depth of old stained glass. To achieve this, de Chavez uses a glazing technique where he starts with black-primed surfaces, building clear acrylic surfaces as he fills in the mid-tones, highlighting it all with whites on the uppermost layer. Against glittering gold leaf, the deep hues and rough features result in striking contrast. Although his depiction of dark skin is a result of technique, it’s a notable feature in a country where light skin is equated with beauty, where the top movie stars are often Eurasian and skin-whitening products fill entire supermarket aisles.

The people de Chavez chooses to paint are often the marginalized: farmers, prisoners, and the poor. Although the rough, neglected quality of their skin is primarily an aesthetic device, it can also be seen as core to the subject matter that his work revolves around—about the willingness and ability of the powerful to trample on the defenseless. In one piece, he tackles the plight of farmers, who are often killed in land and labor disputes. He paints a man carrying a dead friend through a cornfield; behind them, the sunset’s brilliance is shown with a dense arrangement of gold leaf. In another, he addresses the vast jail system, where overcrowding ranks among the world’s worst. Prisoners in his painting huddle together under heavily cast shadows that hide their eyes in dark hollows while gold shines overhead. In another, captors are forced to their knees, heads to the ground, and hands zip-tied behind them as soldiers loom ominously over them; the tightly cropped compositions leave little space for the walls of gridded gold leaf. Each scene is stark and jarring in their own way.

Another distinctive aspect of de Chavez’s art is that his characters’ eyes are always absent, either closed or missing entirely. This was designed to stress how dehumanizing imbalance of power can be. In his Dilim series the subjects’ faces are entirely covered by cloth, which speaks about wanting to escape into oblivion. It’s a reference to the poem Dilim, Mutyang Dilim by Alejandro Abadilla, which he interprets to be about that desire. The urge to disappear into the darkness and forget oneself is present in other pieces too, particularly The Escape To Being And Becoming, which depicts the fall into fatalism and passivity via two men, smoking cigarettes, half-submerged by the dirt ground. “They’re giving up their fate to the seemingly arbitrary laws of space and time,” he says, “instead, relying on a higher power such as religious or state figures.”

de Chavez often responds to other works of art, building off them and extending their frame of reference to the Filipino experience. In When All Terms And Conditions Applied, he turns his gaze towards those in power. Two men embrace in a passionate kiss, a gun protrudes from one of their waists while a loaded wallet sticks out of the pocket of the other. The painting is a reference to the famous Fraternal Kiss piece painted on the Berlin Wall before its fall. He says this reimagining connects what’s happening in the Philippines to the rest of the world. The kiss is symbolic of a deal, one that benefits the powerful, sharing that power and its associated resources among themselves to the detriment of those outside their circles. “Power is equated with and assigned to the male ego,” he says. “This patriarchal and machismo attitude is hostile, deceitful, and arrogant.”

While the church still holds sway in the country, power is now wielded by many other forces. But as de Chavez’s work shows, its centuries of rule helped paved the way for a series of new actors to follow: those with their own interests at heart, not the peoples’.

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Website: www.lesliedechavez.com

Contributor: Mike Steyels
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li