Junyee: Playing with Fire

By Cid Reyes

“Sootine” is what you may want to christen Junyee, the appellation adverting to the Jewish Expressionist painter, Chaim Soutine. That’s after you have seen the Filipino artist’s recent art production using a most unconventional medium – soot. Leave those traditional oils, acrylics and watercolors to other artists, no matter that they may scoff at the eyebrow-raising use of a debased medium such as soot, dust garbage, and other mundane materials. Recall that we have already gone through a movement called Arte Povera (literally, poor art), a most influential movement that has spawned such revolutionary works as sharks floating in a tank, an unmade bed, and dead butterflies. Not to be outdone, Andy Warhol presented his so-called “Oxydation” series, described as large abstract pictures made by covering each canvas with metal dust suspended in a synthetic acrylic binding agent, on to which Warhol and his assistants urinated while the paint was still wet.  

And so Junyee’s use of soot should no longer provoke any sense of outrage. Indeed, the biggest realization of all is still to come: the cave paintings done 20,000 years ago were done using soot! That fact alone should put to rest the question of the integrity of soot as a medium. 

That Junyee should be venturing into soot painting should not even be a puzzle to those who may be familiar with his evolution as an artist. His name is synonymous with installation art in the country, so influential is he that even those who regarded him as a mentor and guru have now made names for themselves. Mention the names Santi Bose and Roberto Villanueva, sadly now both gone, and you get the full import of Junyee’s influence on the younger generation. As installation artist, he savored and feasted on the use of indigenous material (banana leaf and stalk, “kapok”, cotton used as stuffing material). All these have been handcrafted to look like creepy insects.

In a previous exhibition of Junyee’s soot paintings, critic Paul Zafaralla, remarked: “Soot, generally dismissed as a useless substance, has become useful in Junyee’s works. Visually the chiaroscuro is engaging. The uncanny use of indigenous materials he gathers on the slopes of Mount Makiling.” His soot paintings, bearing titles such as “Bago ang Dilim” and “Bago ang Liwanag” allude to light and darkness and the gossamer, enveloping atmosphere of day and night.”

In Junyee’s soot paintings currently on view at the Duemila Gallery, light and darkness are the secretions of shadows, seared by fire on a field of open pictorial space.

How were these soot paintings executed? The process may be likened to the way Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sestine Chapel – flat on his back on a towering scaffolding, with pigments dripping mercilessly on his eye and face. Junyee, too, works flat on his back on a length of a Spartan, long bench. Overhead looms the hanging spread of painted marine plywood, strung from its four corners, in an in-your-face encounter between artist and pictorial ground.

The soot paintings are pure incursions into chiaroscuro (Italian, of course, from chiaro, clear, light; oscuro obscure, dark), satisfying all definitions of the term. By the inexhaustible interplay of light and dark, what is activated is space, from a floating emptiness, as in the work “Almost Morning” and “Last Batch of Stars, or a weighty and roiled skyscape, such as “Night Patch”, “X Matter” and “Nightfall”. A most striking work is “Memories,” which incorporates the interlacing design of an old and tattered “callado” woven fabric, with its delicate, ornate tracery. The painting merges the density of the weave and the wisps of an ethereal smoke. The furry streaks around the irregular edges of the fabric are like the brushy exhalation of ebbing glow.

“Dragon Chasing His Tail (Galactic Donut)”, engages us with its eerie combination of seriousness, relating to a Zen-like circular form, and humor, alluding to that sweet ring-shaped delight and horror of diabetics. Sheer pitch-black soot in an encircling form, flashing like a rude disturbance of a pristine white field, swells into its own psychic realm. Staring at it may induce enlightenment in a communal experience of meditation. The irreverent reference to the donut, however, may elicit an unstifled titter.

There are of course intense associations with stars, luminous in the dark, celestial skies. Van Gogh’s signature work “Starry, Starry Night” was in fact, well, the lodestar of Junyee’s earlier soot paintings. His recent works – titled variously as “New Star”, “Falling Star” – are wrought with scratches and scrapings, clearly yielding unexpected expressive and turbulent surfaces, as though delivered from a deep dark space. What sullen images Junyee can summon  from the mysterious, dismal skies.

Still, the strange, haunting beauty of these soot paintings may not be to everyone’s taste. Junyee is one artist however, who has never succumbed to the blandishments of an art market or the dizzying glories of honors and awards. Indeed, he is known to have rejected several official accolades. His calm, Buddhist demeanor is almost a palpable manifestation of his sense of detachment from the material. But much like his “Galactic Donut,” behind Junyee’s placid stance lurks an unfaltering impish humor. Taking a break from the video documentation of the artist at work, he pauses for a photograph, holding a poster on which he has inscribed: “Soot You.”

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On Lightlessness & Being

by Irwin Cruz

For stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to mankind, Prometheus was chained to a rock and had his liver eaten every day by an eagle. The harshness of this punishment underscores the gravity of the felony, for fire is, after all, a precious and powerful tool having qualities that are both functional and destructive. The artist, Junyee, knows this all too well.

In the 1970s, while studying at the University of the Philippines, he set fire to everything that he owned, save for three pairs of pants, in an act that consummated a slow but progressive, much-desired purgation. “I wanted to purify myself of all what I learned from school,” he said.

Nearly four decades later, Junyee goes back to the element of fire. This time, he uses fire as a device to create rather than to destroy. His work “Dark Matter” displays two sets of soot paintings he had painstakingly made for nearly a year: black-and-whites for the outer section, coloureds in the inner gallery.  

Lying on his back, he uses a gas lamp and the soot that it emits to render these works, using the flame as a ‘brush’. He would cup the lamp in his hands - burning himself at times - and gesture against the marine plywood until the tonalities he desires for the soot are achieved across the plane. The result is a truly sensitive and ethereal work.

‘Dark Matter’ refers firstly to the soot itself - all those layers of accumulated burnt particles whose capacity to act as an imaging material forms the basis of this experiment. Yes, soot and its altered variants such as lampblack or soot sticks have been used as a pigment or inking agents by early mankind in cave paintings, the Greeks and Chinese in calligraphy, and Renaissance painters in their works. Junyee’s technique differs in its immediacy. It is directly applied on the board before it is covered under glass, testifying to both the act and the material’s tentativeness.

As banal and earthly as soot is, ‘Dark Matter’ also alludes to something celestial. ‘Dark matter’ is that utterly mysterious, still little-known component which astronomers believe forms nearly 90% of the entire universe. Outside the scope of ordinary telescopes, dark matter is only discernible because of its gravitational pull, and not by luminance, as other heavenly bodies are. In his image-making, this is what Junyee wanted to approximate: a presence that could pull a viewer solely through its sheer invisible energy, rather than by flashes of its glow.  So, while the artist lifts his humble gas lamp to the direction of the heavens, his strokes in return yield dynamic, almost ethereal image that recall such lightless, far-off regions of space where dark matter keeps the universe together.  Out of empty, white planes, the artist transforms them into windows that open outward to endless hollows, at times framed by wisps of colour, but whose ends are beyond the physical limits of our vision.

The works hence project the acknowledgement of our place in the natural world, a certain humility that many have seem to have forgotten, amidst the rush of technological progress that has inflated our own hubris. “More than art, I spent more time trying to understand the working of the universe,” Junyee says. “I live my life, and I do my art in response to what little I know of what is out there. Dark matter, which science still knows so little of, find resonance in my soot works.”

This suite of works marks a striking departure from what Junyee is mainly known for - as a visionary installation artist sculptor and painter. And yet, it is not a medium he is virgin to as his dabbling with soot dates back to the 1980s. ‘Dark Matter’ marks the culmination of years of trial and error. This exhibition is the largest gathering of such works by the artist in a single space, and decidedly the last exhibition of such kind from him, due to the strain and difficulty of its creation.

But more than viewing the show as yet another high point in the artist’s illustrious career, one must see the less salient but a key aspect of his image-making with fire: the longing attempt to tame what is uncontrollable.