If drawings lend themselves to the world as an artistic medium for one to experience discovery, an insight drawn from the radically hopeful imagination of John Berger, the drawings of the artist Lyra Garcellano in her just-concluded show at Finale Art File, titled Land, Labor, Life: Tracing ‘Progress’ in Selected Notes, expresses political despair, which, unfortunately, can be characterized by what I consider grayscale pessimism. 

By turning the gallery space into a war room of Murillo maps, drawings, Brandt line neon light, and cubist characterization of archival images, Garcellano’s artwork stoically breathes into the atmosphere of geopolitical warfare of contemporary postcolonial Philippines, in which the grayscale color palette converts this exhibition into a military ensemble, acknowledging how it is geopolitically positioned. Unfortunately, the aesthetic freedom remains in the grip of the military cartography and the imperial warfare that counts and defines the acceptable image of one’s imaginable national territory. 

Under the weight of such ideological thinking of ruling sovereignties, our regional situation has ushered Garcellano into a direction where she imagines the folk as faceless, disfigured by the cubist aesthetics, which makes her drawings not only a way to wash away and efface our obsession with the figure or image. Instead, as the faces of the people appear empty, she dares to seize the nerve center of the tensed and quivering sensations of the shatter zones of these territorial disputes in which nation-states poorly perform, and harrowingly lead her to fragments and rubble that figure in and people farmlands, factories and villages being crippled and dwarfed into what Neferti Tadiar calls remaindered life. 

Surviving despair

Garcellano’s drawing, as a result, becomes a process of surviving the seemingly lengthening lines of despair, diminished by the totalizing regimes of oppression, forcing us to neglect or dismiss particularity, nuances, and distinctions, making us all witnesses of a monochromatic grayscale world of pessimism.

The idea of grayscale pessimism comes from the color of the grief that Garcellano performs, evokes and traces in this exhibition. This begins by allowing the specter of art history to haunt us once again. The drawings allude to Francisco Goya whose spectral presence figures in the work  After Goya’s The Junta of the Philippines (La Junta de Filipinas) 1815, drawn with graphite pencil on paper, which Garcellano turns the full oil on canvas, such as the royal red interior linings and margins, the full-color display of the restless crowd in the annual meeting of the Royal Company of the Philippines, along with the surprising presence of King Ferdinand VII at the center, into a color composition where all recede into a monochromatic depiction. By having this tonal register, the junta warps into a cartographic sketch of a seeming court hearing, deepening further the historical experience of Goya as someone whose political optimism was crushed by disappointment as the liberal politics of enlightenment dawned on him and, at the same time, the promise of salvation from the Spanish empire finally exposed its naked lies. Through this drawing, the trick of light of enlightenment appears merely into a haze of walls, charcoal black interiors, and corroding figures of people. 

Leaning into that history, Garcellano presses further valence of the emotional substance of pessimism that can be inhered from even archival works which many believed to be promising in the fields of arts, literary studies, and history. Yet, unfortunately, despite how archives open the wealth of the past, she refuses to take part in such false triumph for the same antique appearance of the photographs would only lead us back to the same social classes, racial subjectivity, and ethnic minoritarianism whose suffering collectively continues. 

In the work Filipinos Labeled as Indios, Garcellano translates an archival photo from American imperialist photography by subduing and ashening the faces of the children, allowing them to be given the chance to change their agency and preventing their photographic visibility and presence from being captured into traces and fading away. As Vicente Rafael shows the power of the native agency in their ability to recognize how, despite being colonial subjects, they look back, repel the camera, and “evade the colonial and national ways of seeing,” such a political perspective allows us also to appreciate Garcellano’s intervention as a form of turning the gaze into a process of disfiguring and withdrawing the same subjects from the colonial appropriation and utility of photography and the archive at large. 

Sexual division of labor

By harnessing the intractable nature and the capability of the people who populate this curatorial exhibition, Garcellano grants a fugitive characterization of them that deepens the blur of the faces as they all collectively figure in a visual body composition informed by the logic of the sexual division of labor. Looking at the drawing 19th Century Women Workers of the Tobacco Monopoly, a work based on a photograph from the archival photos in Ed de Jesus’ history of the tobacco monopoly in the Philippines, we get to see the collective nature of such labor production with a man standing on the left, behaving as an overlord, a stereotype of gender hierarchy. The work 20th Century Moro Boys in the Carpentry Shop, from a photo that alludes to the colonial process of labor servitude such as the Cabo system, shows the scaffoldings of the factory blackening, amplifying the role of contrasts. 

In the juxtaposition of these two works, the sexual division of labor also unravels in the form of an aesthetic display of contrasts, illustrating the seeming permanence of the antinomy of gender and class suffering, and their mark-making in the same spaces where they are forced to be smudged, blurred, and at large, socially displaced, fighting against the effacement of the truth of their desires—a rightful place in our society, a recognition in the share of our country’s wealth, and the value of the very labor that allows this nation to survive. 

The artistic gift of Garcellano, in this case, seizes the inextricable link among the people and how the same link exteriorizes the intersectionality of things despite the persistence of contrasts and divides among color, race, gender and class. All of them are intimately tied especially with the gradation from black to white drawing the range of the grayscale color pessimism that shares an expansive kinship with the critiques of Afro-pessimism whose affect listens to the painful truth of our world history, which Saidiya Hartman articulates as structured by using non-black as the point of departure to imagine freedom. 

Garcellano languishes in this problem by drawing a parallel experience in which our version has also evolved into a chronotope of our national history, appearing in the form of statecraft’s anti-Filipino political unconscious. She displays such tragedy in her neon-light work, The Brandt Line (1970 to 1980 version), which is the very line that divides the world between the global north and global south, illuminating in its curves, wrinkles and folds, providing a luminous presence to fully appreciate the drawings surrounding it and, at the same time, the installation The Things Before Us, where our claims to sovereign rights are weighed down by the dark painted stones, appearing like debris, along with the digital map of Pogo hubs, military training camps, and economic zones across the country, the West Philippine Sea, and our Murillo map, figuring as it is superimposed, a display of counter-mappings. 

Solidarity

With the dissimulation of empires of what can be considered as the people’s map, this exhibition of Garcellano is also an expression of solidarity with other nations whose maps are erased day by day, from Palestine to Ukraine. She allows her anger, protestations, and discontent to trace into the works, and make us follow through. Her hands are leading us to draw and trace further from and through our suffering, anger, and, in her case, pessimism as she confronts a history that Carmita Eliza de Jesus Icasiano calls “cyclical movements.” It’s a history where she sees how Garcellano’s understanding situates us in a truth where we seem to revert to our subjugated past, and the hope she wants us to disentangle from has never been premised on naïve optimism. 

Instead, Garcellano performs the autobiographical drawing of our country, without the rose-colored spectacles of liberalism, and bourgeois nationalism. She draws for us to immerse further in the depths of the grayscale color of our past and present, in the pains that colonial history may repeat once again, and in the fact that we may lose everything that we have, even our current country to which we dearly pledge our freedom and belonging—optimism of the hand, pessimism of the heart.

Jose Mari Cuartero is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.