Richard Gomez's alla prima painting of a yellow dick is a declaration that art comes in the most unpredictable forms. It is a defiant statement against everyone else's concept of fine art, a combination of anti-art Fauvism and Pinoy pop. It is graffiti, it is the imagery frequently painted by gangs on walls, it is the doodle we often find in the back pages of every adolescent boy's notebook. It is a reminder that, while the cave people of Lascaux painted animals on their walls because their primary concern was survival, what we paint on walls today is a shallow expression of body awareness--the power, or the lack of it, to conquer our fellow human beings by means of sex.
The dick is yellow not in reference to any political party. It is an allusion to Homer Simpson, the loser, the ultimate dick, which the Filipino may have dwindled down to. It is a reference both to the seduction of the young male and to the Filipino male's struggle against impotence as he approaches middle age. Though the Filipino's penis is erect, we infer that he is not in an upright but in a lying, passive, receiving position, as seen from the way the balls are not hanging but splayed.
The slapdash execution of the work is both deliberate and definitive: this image could not have been executed in any other way. It elicited exactly the reactions it did from the pretentious, the hifalutin, the self-righteous, the hypocritical, and the ignorant. Yellow and black field ae the usual combination employed in road signs that warn us of danger. The danger, indeed, is in our frequent failure to recognize messages by immediately rejecting them and making U-turns where we are not supposed to make them.
Yes, we are called upon to see things that we do not see. Here is a work by someone who was frequently perceived as a sex object from his youth onward. Now he is telling us that even we are that someone, creatures equally brainwashed to value physical beauty, attractiveness, and sex appeal as a result of e-commerce, advertising, and entertainment.
Danger: Seduction of the youth.
Danger: Impending loss of potency.
Photo from the Internet
The dick is yellow not in reference to any political party. It is an allusion to Homer Simpson, the loser, the ultimate dick, which the Filipino may have dwindled down to. It is a reference both to the seduction of the young male and to the Filipino male's struggle against impotence as he approaches middle age. Though the Filipino's penis is erect, we infer that he is not in an upright but in a lying, passive, receiving position, as seen from the way the balls are not hanging but splayed.
The slapdash execution of the work is both deliberate and definitive: this image could not have been executed in any other way. It elicited exactly the reactions it did from the pretentious, the hifalutin, the self-righteous, the hypocritical, and the ignorant. Yellow and black field ae the usual combination employed in road signs that warn us of danger. The danger, indeed, is in our frequent failure to recognize messages by immediately rejecting them and making U-turns where we are not supposed to make them.
Yes, we are called upon to see things that we do not see. Here is a work by someone who was frequently perceived as a sex object from his youth onward. Now he is telling us that even we are that someone, creatures equally brainwashed to value physical beauty, attractiveness, and sex appeal as a result of e-commerce, advertising, and entertainment.
Danger: Seduction of the youth.
Danger: Impending loss of potency.
Photo from the Internet
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