Suspended between human contempt and the insidiousness of
academism, Buen Calubayan unfolds a personal archaeology of visual
culture in the form of anachronistic pseudo-environmental projects that
act as contaminants to question the discursive role of religion and
established values. Through reversals and a stripped down, no-frills aesthetics
that provokes and engenders darker layers of incorrectness, his works
harbor truths on the history of evangelization in art. The "decorum" of
the works itself steps back from the excessive moralism currently burdening
the cultural politics of religion and the artistic climate of the local art
scene.

However. the concerns of decentralization are also fundamental to
Calubayan's works. He circumvents cynicism and the hybridization of
thoughts and ideas while commenting on the sprawling culture of
consumption of goods and images. By reiterating his penchant for flawed
classification and legitimization, his paintings and illustrations are offset
by poetical-romantic, melancholic and at times tragic overtones – mutilated
in their original designation, dispossessed of their contextual
reference. This often stirs a taste for the spectacular in the audience,
which raises intriguing moral questions when the solemnity of the litany
is juxtaposed with the idiocy of the gesture as satire or parody.

Similarly, a sense of menace, precariousness and imminent collapse
prevails within the openness and uncertainty of Calubayan's works.
Embracing the slippages between image and the viewer, he explores
fate, chance, accident and coincidence in a series of projects that require
no specific consideration- a pointless blank perhaps, but following a sinister logic of rationalization, on what
constitutes the right kind of painting, gallery, arts school and criticism. Such a recapitulation of the modes of
today's super-commercial art world recalls "The Wrong Gallery's" (2002) stratagems. At times contradictory
and deliberately complicated, but insidiously internalized, his works create layers of underlying structures belied
by the profusion of forms and the notion of pure expression and spontaneous gesture.

But the real impulse behind his works appears to be the distortion of iconographies and the emergence of
ambivalence. Calubayan questions the validity and critical nature of academic categories and the process of
interrogating visual language. Clashing with censorious litigations of 19th century colonialists, his works intercept
and confront us with carefully controlled information about the unrecognized environment around us. He points
to a continuing, century-long period of cultural entropy, a hierarchical perspective that charts the possibilities
of an interesting field of engaged autonomy.

Locked into the system but active outside In both institutional and non-institutional context, it is this technique of disclosing images
and signs, with intimations of chaos or breakdown- using art as a way to test the limits and provoke new ideas- which we must
harness to enable us to deal effectively with the dominant ideas of our age. It is a kind of paradox undermining the contemplative
mausoleum of a culture, forgotten and transformed from its genealogy to be freed from the frescoes of the Apocalypse.

If ever there was a need for a snapshot of the power and limits of religion, here you have it.
And for every dog, there's a different master.

-- Wire Tuazon