The Varsitarian

TWELVE artists of different philosophies and artistic styles were brought together by their environmental advocacy in Our Mother’s Boiling Point, which ran recently at the Lunduyan Art Gallery in Quezon City.

Zeus Bascon, JL Burgos, Con Cabrera, Leo Castillo, Mideo Cruz, Arthur dela Cruz, Mariuz Funtillar, Milmal Onal, Marga Rodriguez, Dicky Joe Santos, Katrina Tan and Felix Petel Jr., all graduates of UST, showed works that generally depicted nature’s degradation due to pollution and exploitation.

Mariuz Funtilla, a Fine Arts in Painting graduate, used cigarettes and other smoking paraphernalia in a mixed-media work, “Hindi Ka Pa Ba Naiinitan?”

“It’s ironic that everything that I put in the work destroys the ozone layer, but this art work tells its audience to stop (from smoking),” Funtillar told the Varsitarian.

In the work, a green lighter in the center symbolizes nature, while the surrounding ashes depict the earth. A combination of orange and white cigarette butts form thunder-like images that hit the ashes. The black background is made of cigarette filter.

An alumnus of the old College of Architecture and Fine Arts, JL Burgos’s acrylic work, “Breath,” depicts factory chimneys belching smog.

“Reckoning,” by Felix Petel Jr., presents a foreboding vision: a young, half-naked woman holding a skull. The woman represents Mother Nature while the skull represents mankind’s fate. The background displays an image of hope, depicted by a white dove resting on a bald tree’s branch.

Hope is further emphasized by a big puddle of clean water, which shows a healthy tree, contrasting a bald real one.

“I want to impress on my audience that it is not yet too late to change and that there is still hope,” Petel said.

Gallery owner Dicky Joe Santos made “Black and White Clouds,” a painting that has white clouds pouring petrol rain over burning objects.

Mideo Cruz’s mixed-media work, “Start of the New Epoch,” consists of a pulley holding a round stone on the right side and a rectangular piece of plaster on the left. On the plaster, the zodiac symbol for Taurus is embedded. All these are set on a black background that gives it a sense of infinity, nothingness, and mystery.

Another enigmatic mixed-media piece is “Disturbance” by Milmar Ignacio Onal. It shows a bare golden tree on a red background – the whole thing looks like a face when viewed from afar. It is representative of nature’s current state, as the face is shown crying. James C. Talon