Filipino artist Jessie Mariñas is a fertile interpreter of the social realist style of painting. His art is a profound tribute to the great Philippine painter of the late 1800’s, Juan Luna. Luna was famous for his realism and vernacular subject-matter. Indeed, Mariñas’s art gives you a contemporary appreciation for Luna’s masterly oeuvre.
In the Philippines, where it has become far too easy to take for granted the lives of the common tao, the art that Mariñas has produced magnifies the images that are generated by the mundane existence of the Filipino people. A perfect example of Mariñas’s social realist images on canvas is his painting “Daybreak.” The image displays a woman giving a young child a soapy bath in full public view of a marketplace in Divisoria, a bustling commercial section of Manila.
Mariñas’s art is a collective act of defiance, a commendable act of defiance against those who rationalize or disdain the plight of the downtrodden. When knocked by other artists for producing images that feature the lost souls of the Philippines’ socio-economic reality, Mariñas responded indignantly to one of them in particular. This artist informed Mariñas that he was also from a poor country and a victim of sexual assault, but didn’t feel that he had to “reflect these experiences in my paintings.”
Referring to himself, Mariñas countered unequivocally that he “paints what my eyes see.” As for his detractor, Mariñas held nothing back: “You were raped and yet all your paintings are flowers. That is not you.”
In a dexterous combination of style and substance, Mariñas imagines art that speaks to the simplicity and to the black-and-white clarity of ordinary Filipinos. His works turn away from idealized representations and instead portray his fellow countrymen and women as they are, in all their precarious circumstances and the day-to-day struggles that arise from them. When looking at Mariñas’s art, one feels this timbre permeate the senses. It makes viewers think they are in the middle of a complicated dialectic, a dialectic between reaching an autonomous aesthetic state and a natural recognition of depth and space in a challenging social context.
You can discern this consanguinity between art and life in Mariñas’s endearment with the municipality of Angono, which lies in the Philippine province of Rizal. Here, the big-city atmosphere of the capital Manila is washed away in favor of the arts at some of their finest in the islands. During his visits to the Philippines, Mariñas has regularly made it a point to make a sojourn to Angono. It’s not hard to see why his choice of destination was inspired. Angono is considered to be the art capital of the Philippines. The community of over 100,000 residents also happens to be the hometown of the late visual artist Carlos “Botong” Francisco and the venue for the oldest artistic arrangement extant in the archipelago, the Angono Petroglyphs.
Mariñas cherishes his connection with Angono. As he commented, “Angono is the painting capital of the Philippines, the perfect place to harness inspiration for someone like me who's searching for an identity...the influence is just overwhelming everywhere. In Angono, Mariñas painted ten works that expressed how he perceived the municipality. Although he made sure he didn’t simply duplicate the style most familiar to Angono’s artists. As he said, “Everybody paints the same style but that didn't stop me from creating my own...but I prove to them that I can be one of them even though my style is not the same as them.” Mariñas adds that “I have a different perception of life...I paint what I feel and from what I see specifically from being surrounded by squatters where I'm living in.”
In one of his Angono paintings, Mariñas offers his audience a glimpse of the folk Filipino at their simplest and most unadulterated. It features an elderly woman carrying gabe vegetable on top of her head.
The woman’s face is marked for its guilelessness, for its kindly, grandmotherly countenance, and for its stoic acceptance of its owner’s fate. Life in general is a taxing eventuality and this shows in this illustration. The woman’s face reveals the years that she has amassed since her arrival on earth. The woman imparts a deep-rooted indifference to what life has put her through, an indifference that is unfortunately shared by a substantial portion of the Philippine population.
Mariñas’s spiritual and existential contiguity to the Filipino grass roots is richly lifelike not only in his figures and images, but also in his own beginnings. Mariñas takes into the scope of his artistic vision the fact that he was born among the lower classes. This has allowed him to identify with the despairing social, economic, and cultural environment that has imposed itself on Filipinos for decades.
Granting that as a young man he earned a fine arts degree from the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines, Mariñas’s career path didn’t exactly portend a future as an artist. It was in 1973 that Mariñas came to the United States. As a senior mechanics principal designer in America, he would be employed as a specialist in oil platforms and plant designing. Mariñas did this for some 35 years until his retirement. Not quite the track a prospective adept in the liberal arts would usually follow.
It is said that suffering can be a stylistic source of creativity for any artist. In Mariñas’s case, it is physical hardship that has played a central role in his art. The security that so many of us feel healthwise eroded for Mariñas when he had to have several spinal operations, operations that forced him in his 30’s into an early retirement. 2002 was the year where his surgical ordeals mercifully came to an end.
As he was recovering, Mariñas said that he “would always hear a whisper in the wind saying that the miracle that [God] promised was there.” As it happened, his surgeries turned out to be blessings in disguise for Mariñas who has tapped into his painful past as a wellspring for his creative compositions. For the Manteca, California-based Mariñas, being compelled into retirement was a heaven-sent opportunity. As Mariñas said at that major turning point in his life, “God has given me another chance...My life is just starting.”
It wasn’t easy at first for him, for as his spirit and body waned under the weight of his surgeries, Mariñas began to doubt God. He indignantly asked his creator whether his misery was his “reward for serving you?” But in the midst of his trials and tribulations, Mariñas eventually came to realize that God never gave up on him. Indeed, one of the faithful might say that God closed one door to Mariñas in order to open a new one---in the form of a miracle:
“Later on I realized that the miracle He was showing to me disabled me so I couldn’t go back to engineering. Since then, I dedicated all my surgeries to Him and use it as my inspiration to get to where I am now. The more surgeries, the better I get as an artist. This is really true.”
Now, as he approaches 70 years of age, Mariñas can happily say that he is earning his living by doing what he loves: painting. This love of his art is what any artist needs to exhibit the most cutting-edge and natural works.
In “Imeldific,” Mariñas gives us a surrealistic glimpse of the aura that surrounded the former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos during her heyday. Mariñas uses a mélange of shapes and colors in order to depict the woman once called the “Steel Butterfly.” Undaunted by conventional artistic norms, Mariñas presents a singular artistic narrative of a singular public persona in “Imeldific.”
The painting consists of a profile of Imelda Marcos embedded within an assortment of diamond patterns. Imelda Marcos is seen here in the prime of her physical appeal which coincided with the period that represented the height of her husband’s---President Ferdinand Marcos---rule. It is in “Imeldific” that Mariñas fuses the aesthetic with the political. Drawing on contemporary Philippine history, he implies a nebulous contempt and resentment of the interplay of greed and corruption that crystallized in the figure of Imelda Marcos.
At the same time, Mariñas retains a shred of sympathy for Imelda. From the artist’s perspective, the painting lends itself as one to convey the melancholy that many of the rich and powerful surprisingly endure. As someone who has been through hell and back, Mariñas finds that he can reserve some grounds for compassion for the controversial former First Lady: “I also sense her sadness, even if surrounded by all of this brilliance.”
Today, Jessie Mariñas is at the peak of his art career. He continues to render artworks of wonderful variety, quality, and meaning. Mariñas is perpetually enhancing his growing reputation with ever more multifaceted and resourceful productions. It is a reputation indebted to Mariñas’s humanistic attitude to the world, to the moral, social, and cultural imperatives of his visual language, to his mastery of his profession, and to the artistic generosity of the Filipino people.
ALLEN GABORRO
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