ABOUT THE WORK

Clearly, the subjects cum unnamed personalities in the paintings of Mark Justiniani are not so much portraits of individuals, but of character types. The man is covering his lips but the access to his thoughts is a keyhole (on the forehead) away. While Justiniani introduces a comic note, he is more complex than a mere cartoon figure, for he also symbolizes the ludicrous and the absurd, as well as of the opposite grotesque as he leapfrogs over lesser creatures, or plays the power game with other equally hefty colleagues. Mark Justiniani, once identified with Social Realism through the 80’s and 90’s in the Philippines through artist-activist initiatives like Salingpusa (1984) and Sanggawa (1994), has always been working with notions of how we perceive reality.