The Joy Of Painting – every painter feels it but not probably the same way as Bob Ross did, the quintessential “happy” landscape painter who use to do painting demos on US TV PBS and broadcasted on local channel RPN 9. For everything he accomplishes in 30 minutes flat, it’s been all the same – the same snow-capped mountains, the same calm waves that are more velvet-like, the stick-thin trees rendered with a sharp edge of the palette knife, the flusterry clouds, the mossy foliage produced by a quick whip of a fan brush – configurable in pigments Bob Ross himself also manufactures, in sap green, van dyke brown, Prussian blue and midnight black. The landscapes are obviously from the Northern hemisphere, but the solitariness and ultra placid calm that would’ve been utopian are more eerie, unworldly, unsafe if only for the conspicuous absence of other creatures like people or even animals. Seeing all of them in succession would’ve made you think that Bob Ross as a hippie visionary who disdains human contact.
It is from this premise that Jayson Oliveria focuses on his latest series of paintings featured in his exhibit at Mag:net Katipunan entitled Truth Adjustment. Six of which are direct copies from Bob Ross instructional book The Joy of Painting, but with some adjustments – a naked boy pissing at the foaming waves in the dark night while a black dog perched on a rocky cliff does the same thing; a huge anaconda blocks the road to a humble cottage set in a peach melba sunset; a plastic-torch- bearing retard Olympian runs over a frozen lake in a snowy mauve haze. These elements, again downloaded from the internet, are Photoshopped in the scenes to emphasize the perilous nature of these landscapes if they ever existed, but made more ridiculous by their placement in such. This becomes another tactic for Oliveria to orchestrate yet another absurdist theatrics of The Sublime which is usually associated with Landscape painting, (and as the progenitor of abstract painting in its sweeping universality.)
Oliveria’s plaster casts of miniature tombstones, 50 in all, with various concepts and seemingly “big” words painted on each (e.g. black holes, exploration, hopes and dreams, history) somewhat pins down the curse on such sublimity, a sublimity too burdened by a lot of concepts, history, and “artistic license” (whatever the hell that means). Art has thus become an omen for nature and through which we can only see grotesqueness in its representation of its demise or destruction or even its perfection. But as to quote another artist, “grotesque only applies to humans, there is no such thing in the natural world” (Robert Langenegger,
Truth Adjustment will be on view from
