BY:PHILIP PARAAN

Red light districts are heedlessly regarded as territories of cheap and quick pleasures operating only on a lustful agenda and sexual fetishes, yet they are also places of stark and sublime ironies.

While there is an eerily lifelessness by day in these sinful enclaves, at night, they turn alive, teeming with not just with restlessness but with such jarring nocturnal drama. In between its dark streets, dim interiors and blinking lights are frolic of farcical intimacy and hush transactions between whores, pimps and their pleasure seeking clientele.

These places are also predicated with contempt, often being regarded as amoral, illegal and yet they thrive on a steady demand and have since been pervasively and ubiquitously present in our midst, in every society and in every culture.

Art and its dalliances with prostitution perhaps is not a novel idea. In fact, a lot of creative geniuses have personally patronized, engaged and indulged in prostitution and were captivated by the complex notions of deviance, its peculiar charms and its very social function. These include Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Georges Rouault, Toulouse Lautrec, Dennis Potter, Pablo Picasso, Paul Verlaine and many more. Manet’s Olympia and Dega’s ballerinas were in fact painted with prostitutes as muses. Such fascination may perhaps be rooted in their similarly situated issues of being acknowledged merely entertainment and commodities for the privileged and much just like whores in a manner that is exploitative and disposable.

In this signification and context, Max Balatbat presents his second solo show.

Internasyonal Kabaret, a brothel in Caloocan is a special place for Balatbat, a place which deeply moved to him to paint and to understand life. It became his own catalytic impetus in the formation of his art as well as his personal and creative views. With memories all remembered from his early manhood, Balatbat intends to again map out the moving appeal and collective charms of these lowly places and sundry of characters thriving here and give meaning to their experiences and their ennobling sense of resilience, survival and triumph of spirit despite all the adversities.

Retaining much of his style, Balatbat, brings together his recent opuses with honeycomb like prints, grids, blocks and other linear elements which form an undulating pastiche in canvas. With this recent works, he reveals his steady engagement to fulfill a greater refinement of contemporary art production.

In framing such memories, he intently makes it his creative gesture to tilt such social torpor, undermine the taboo and contempt and find the gentle humanity behind those considered social dregs and spurned class and their communes.

Without changing register and blinking his intentions, this show represents the loci of his psychological parry and thrust between discrimination and acceptance.