INNOVATION
THE WORK
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Photos courtesy by TBWA \ Santiago Mangada Puno
The medium is the message. The poignant scenes of life by the river today— innocent and expressive children frolicking in waterways fringed by their own shanty homes and playing with floating plastic debris, river folk scavenging the waters for what they can find, and fantastic scenes of gigantic janitor fish being hugged by youth— were depicted with a palette of colors limited to burnt sienna, sepia, umber, ochre, grey, and black.
The gorgeous artworks, painted on pristine watercolor papers and neatly framed and encased in glass, give no hint that the pigments were derived from the extremely polluted and biologically dead urban estuaries and tributaries that they depicted— paint so toxic that it had to be decontaminated by autoclave and so filthy that the artists had to wear medical-grade masks to protect them from the stench while the concentrated pollution-derived paint was still wet. This was all for a cause that seeks to one day make this very same painting exhibit impossible, as clean and clear waters of living rivers leave no trace on paper.
Veteran painter Toti Cerda, the nation’ s preeminent watercolorist, together with John Carlo Vargas, Kean Barrameda, Fred Failano, Allan Clerigo, Van Isunza, Luigi Almuena, Renee Ysabelle Jose, and John Ed De Vera, this generation’ s most promising water color artists, came together for the“ Dirty Water” exhibition at Kirov, The Rockwell Center, Makati City, that ran from May 24 to 26, 2016. The exhibit was made possible by the ABS-CBN Lingkod Kapamilya Foundation, Inc., its Kapit Bisig Para sa Ilog Pasig being the exhibit’ s prime beneficiary,
July- August 2016 | adobo magazine