Paris is everyone’s dream destination. Artists, most especially, are drawn to the City of Lights. The Eiffel Tower beckons them like a lighthouse promising refuge from a world that is inhospitable to art.
Yet strangely, some French artists find the same beauty of metropolitan life in Cebu. Last year, I met the traveling artist Arno Rocher, who fell in love not just with the place but with a pretty Cebuana.
Arno stayed long enough for him to produce a series of collages and sketches of his travels here. He was a good sketch artist who could make gesture drawings of anything from the siomai and fried chicken stalls across the University of San Carlos in Talamban to the jeepneys in Colon.
In his small sketchbook, he even made drawings of fellow passengers in a jeepney, allowing occasional bumps and shakes to dictate his strokes. It was interesting, he told me, how you had to draw while in constant motion.
These works were featured in a show held for only two days in two venues: in a garden restaurant on the first day and in a disco bar on the second. I attended both occasions and was a bit saddened that very few local artists came to see it.
Among the few who came was another French artist, Parisian Remy Rault. It was our first meeting and I instantly liked him even if he finds it a bit difficult to speak in English.
Like Arno, Remy fell in love not just with the city but with one of its residents, a pretty girl who helped tour him around when he first came to Cebu in 2010. The couple plans to marry soon.
Like Arno, Remy has been traveling around Asia, showing his work in galleries and interacting with local artists. On his way back to Paris , he strayed to Cebu on a tip by a friend he met in Hongkong. He came over wanting to check out the art scene.
He instantly fell in love with the generosity and friendliness of Cebuano artists. He soon became a member of the Cebu Artists Incorporated which he now considers a family.
But Remy finds inspiration in the cosmopolitan character of the city itself: “I love the world of cities, especially the ‘megacities.’ I visited Tokyo and Hong Kong and they have these hyper-urban areas that made me feel good. I love the energy they emit. I found a certain borderline poetry. In Tokyo, in particular, I found the atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s film ‘Blade Runner’.”
Remy felt he needed this “outrageous universal energy.” “I find the same energy here in the Philippines . But it comes from the blazing tropical nature. My encounter with this energy was a big surprise for me. It can also be read in the faces of Filipinos.”
The artist has since been actively participating in group exhibitions with paintings that usually are a montage of planets, details of tropical life, abstract patterns, and texts often written on canvas by friends.
Remy recently held his first solo exhibition in a small eatery on the lower floor of his apartment. Like that of Arno , the unlikely exhibit venue gave a casual or, if you may, guerrilla ambiance to the exhibit. But this was complemented by a superb array of hors d’oeuvres, thanks to his landlord who is a professional chef.
“I like the ambience of the place and the food is excellent,” he said. “In Paris, it is common to exhibit in restaurants and I also like to exhibit in a place where ordinary life takes place. It is also accessible to all people not just for the specialists of culture. For me, art is a communal property of humanity.”
Most Cebuanos (artists among them) look up to Paris for its glamour and high life. But French artists have shown that it’s the simple life among ordinary people in the open city that makes Cebu actually close to Paris . We don’t have to leave home to experience the romance.