Provenance: Norman Crisologo Collection

ABOUT THE WORK

A sense of the carnivalesque pervades Jeepney, one of Melvin Culaba’s early works. One is wont to say that the jeepney should be attractive, a sort of unique experience unavailable to any other country or culture. Yet the chaos of the painting is all too familiar — the overstuffed rows of seats, the tenuousness of real space and time, the communal suffering under hazy, hot air. One is lead to ask if Jeepney, arguably the masterpiece of this young artist’s oeuvre, is merely a caricature of our distinctive form of public transportation or a microcosm of an unsettling Filipino reality. At the very bottom corners of Jeepney, the viewer glimpses two sets of steel handrails, establishing the perspective of the conductor, who often takes his post at the jeepney door for the duration of the ride. The wider end of the jeepney is littered with the symbols alluding to the country’s most valuable institutions: Church and State. Immediately visible are the Philippine flag wrapped over a baby’s head and the popular image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, echoed in an adjacent image of the Pietà, albeit with the Mother and the Christ figure leaning away from each other. As the eye moves up, details of the passengers become more and more surreal, eventually vanishing into an abyss of indefinite forms. This is no more evident than in the passenger sporting a grinning pig mask and a pennant that screams “IBUTO ULI”, no less significant as a nationally-recognized symbol of political scandals and the commonly perceived motivation of politicians to vie for re-election rather than to seek the common good. Perhaps the most disquieting thing about Jeepney is that despite the abundance of human bodies, of identities so distinct from one another, of values and symbols so recognizable in the whole range of Philippine experience, Culaba avoids any sense of real intimacy with these characters by obscuring, in one way or another, their faces. It’s reflective of the real way that riders on any form of public transportation tend to avoid any interaction with each other, simply acknowledging that they are all simply going the same way. Yet by exaggerating the familiar elements, Culaba pushes the viewer to feel uneasy and at the same time wonder how it could be possible for anyone to avoid each other with all that distress. The conductor’s perspective reinforces this idea, given his authority over the affairs that take place within the jeepney. Apart from calling out to the driver to stop for passengers, he is chiefly responsible for collecting payment and rendering what is due. What makes this painting strangely apropos in the face of the current administration is that it isn’t simply a call for those in authority to consider what really needs to be done in order to attain a better, just society. Putting the viewer in the conductor’s place, Culaba invites us to look up and take notice.