ANATOMY reveals that if you stretched out the human nervous system from end to end, a person’s peripheral nerves would extend around 60 kilometers – that’s roughly the distance between Iloilo City and San Joaquin, a dozen or so kilometers more than the journey artist Arel Zambarrano has to take when visiting his hometown of Banate in Iloilo Province.
In his newest exhibit “Flexible Nerves,” the social realist Zambarrano alludes to the strength and also the fragility of the human body – all the while paying tribute to the Filipino everyman: often stretched thin, overworked to the bone, their waking days spent toiling to provide a meagre living for their families.
For his fourth solo show to date, the young Zambarrano draws parallels between the grind and labor of the average Filipino blue collar worker with his own struggles as an emerging artist, as a leader in Iloilo’s art community, and as a new father. Coming from an underprivileged background, Zambarrano’s affinity to the everyman is readily apparent in the ingenuity in his choices of medium: heavy concrete, nails, shovels, and countless otherwise mundane paraphernalia – given a new lease on life as pieces of art.
Upon entering the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art’s Hulot space, your eye-line is immediately assaulted by the poignant installation “Calm Surface, Intense in the Underneath” – comprised of 34 concrete casts of Zambarrano’s own two legs and feet jutting out from crushed gravel laid out on the floor. The number of the sculptures corresponds to the artist’s age, as he had turned 34 just early December last year.
Around the sprawling installation are 15 socio-political canvases from the dynamic Zambarrano, most featuring images of the Philippines’ everyman: construction workers, farmers, pedicab drivers, porters, and miners, among others.
Those familiar with Zambarrano’s body of work will notice a deliberate shift in the artist’s outlook and “optimism” – notably a departure from the cynicism and jarring melancholy of the unapologetic yet defeatist “Juan dala Krus,” the artist’s two-man show with his mentor Angelo “Junjun” Duarte in 2017, when the duo skewered the archetypes of the country’s ills and fractured culture.
Of course, Zambarrano’s newfound “unlimited optimism” is rooted on none other than his unica hija, now two-year-old Aey – fatherhood lending him a new pair of eyes to see the world from. In “Purya Usog,” the new patriarch recounts the ordeal of his daughter suffering from pneumonia, relating the lengths which parents are willing to go through just to ensure that their offspring do not suffer any pain. Here Zambarrano subverts the Ilonggo superstition by anointing a portrait of his daughter with innumerable “carmen” – a common local talisman or charm that often comes in the form of a small carmine pouch, pinned to children’s clothes to ward off illness.
Zambarrano is quickly emerging as one of the uncompromising voices in Iloilo’s art community, staunch on his beliefs and grit, unparalleled in his craft and perseverance.
“Flexible Nerves” opened at ILOMOCA’s Hulot space on Jan. 24 and runs until Feb. 20, 2020./PN
