Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Known for his Biowork series that investigates the intersection of the artist’s life and history that is expressed in mostly process-oriented works, Buen Calubayan has also been pursuing a series that features popes as subjects, unpacking Catholic influence within the context of the Philippines as being one of the biggest Catholic countries in the world as well as examining how portraiture continues to be a site — and a perpetuation — of power. Painting Christendom’s highest figure has had long history, with highlights ranging from Raphael’s depictions of Pope Julius and Leo X to Diego Velasquez’s portrait of Innocent X. In the 20th century, painting the Pope had a distinctly subversive tone, especially when we consider the works of Francis Bacon which are nightmarish deconstructions of the Velasquez original: the visually shocking study after Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X and the faintly blasphemous Figure with Meat. Calubayan’s approach is more in line with Bacon’s (and possibly Mauricio Catellan’s, whose sculptural work shows Pope John Paul II struck by a meteor) with his depiction of Pope Benedict XVI. Known to be a staunch doctrinal conservative and the only pope in recent memory to have retired (and, in effect, ushering the reign of Pope Francis perceived to be as charismatic as Pope John Paul II), Pope Benedict XVI is shown sitting stoically on what appears to be a concrete chair, his gaze boring into the viewer. The artist has positioned the pope away from the instruments and adornments of his office (except for his vestments that announce his position as the Vicar of Christ) to an impressionistic landscape, replete with looming, dark clouds threatening the onslaught of rain. While not as sinister as Bacon’s, Calubayan’s portrait has an unnerving quality, endowing the figure with an all-seeing ability as he examines the purity of the soul of anyone who looks. What subverts this painting work as a straightforward portraiture is the colony of mice seen crawling by the work, which symbolize infestation, ruin, and the Black Death, which decimated human population in Europe and Asia during the 1300s, the time when Christianity was consolidating its power, by about 200 million — considered as one of the most devastating pandemics in human history. The juxtaposition of the Pope and the mice establishes uneasy associations: are the mice indicative of the faithful or the devastation gnawing at the heels of Catholicism? By foregrounding these associative qualities, Calubayan is raising questions about a certain psychological state shaped by piety and how it registers discomfort, if not outrage, when images connected to religion are portrayed in an unfavorable light. The panic, no doubt, comes from the superstitious avowal that the depiction has a direct connection to its subject: sympathetic magic. By introducing wild divergences from the “official” portrait into his work and extending it to the space of the viewer with the presence of the mice, Calubayan, one of the best mid-career artists practicing today, quarries the terrain of belief in order to expose the intractable fissures and fault lines.