In his previous work, artist and poet Josua Cabrera drips and splatters tuba on paper, later filling up the Jackson Pollock-like abstractions with figurative drawings to fit a narrative based on a poem he wrote.
That series led him to experiment more with coconut wine as a medium of art. The red stain of tuba has deep tonal values and it’s been tested to be hard to remove, even with the toughest bleaching agent. It has a sepia-like hue, which makes it a good alternative to single-tone watercolor.
As a poet writing in Cebuano, Josua tends to wax nostalgic about his more pastoral childhood in Maasin, Southern Leyte. He also writes about his misadventures as a probinsyano in the big city.
His last poem “Baktas” (Hike), an unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness verse meant to suggest how we chase our breath as we walk fast especially, as the poem goes, when we are hungry at the same time.
The poet recalls how as a student he had to walk kilometers in the city to avoid commuting in order to save money. But these long walks allowed him to observe the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people in the city. It made him familiar with the details and texture of urban poverty, images that would haunt not only his poetry but also his drawings, cartoons and paintings.
Josua’s recent solo exhibition titled “Kal-ang” catalogs some of these images of urban life in Cebu. He takes the viewer on a virtual walk of the city, not only of its iconic tourist spots but also of its hidden parts, like the red light districts of Kamagayan and Pelaez Street.
These scenes are portrayed using a combination of drawing, collage consisting of torn pages of newspapers, and tuba painting. The latter involves a new technique of peeling off masked areas of a drawing after they had been brushed over with washes of tungog or the red dye added to bahalina or fresh tuba.
The tape preserves the pristine whiteness of paper which provides a unique positive space against the field of sepia. This method of subtraction is also repeated in the use of decollage or the deliberate peeling off of pasted fragments of newspaper so that it reveals the under layer.
Decollage is a technique first employed by French artists in the 1960s, who got the idea from how ripped political posters reveal previous posters pasted on walls, thus implying the chance revelation for the public of hidden texts and images.
Deprived of this element of chance unique to street art, Josua is left to use decollage only for its aesthetic appeal, mainly for the sheer serendipity of texture and form. Yet he makes up for it by choosing texts to match his images from the random headlines of tabloids he collected.
As to the use of tuba, the artist said that he wanted it simply to be a reminder of his rural origins. The familiar red stain connects this new series to his earlier work using the medium, which was not as conceptually tight.
And in keeping with the artist’s affinity with poetry, a reading of Cebuano poems was held during the opening ceremony by his colleagues in the literary group Bathalad. The basabalak (poetry reading) came after the cocktails which was a buffet of pungko-punko fare a choice of tuba: red or white (bahalina).
Most of the poets read their balak with the symbolic tagay taken in moderation, of course, out of respect for the exhibit venue which is the Contemporary Alternative Art Studio of the Sacred Heart Parish.
Yet, I’d like to think that if Christ had been a Cebuano, he would have invited us to the same pungko-pungko meal with puso and tuba.
You can still catch Josua’s show during office hours in the parish gallery. But I can’t guarantee that you get a free tagay of sweet bahalina.