Southology

Gorilla Art - Bigger than chimp-sized drawings

By Nick ⋅ February 13, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅

In Parañaque, the city that never sleeps (literally!), there are more things to do than just drink or shop. Before the air got heavy with smoke, I used to jog from my place round to Tropical Palace taking Aguirre and then back to my house, about a good thirty minutes’ worth. There are some nice houses along the way, and some horribly pitiful ones, and some that Betty and I like to think of as “drug lords’ palaces” because of their sheer size. We sometimes take her car and drive around to get to the more inaccessible places, in the guise of a married couple gone out to look for a place to rent. We find all sorts of stuff, not just houses: old muscle cars rusting in front of garages, vegetable patches in empty lots, heavily canopied but beautiful streets, etc.

Add to this list a growing number of seemingly inconspicuous pieces of street art. Not hip-hop graffiti, which I personally find rather unpleasant because very few in this village can do it right, but something on the wacky side, quirky, sometimes funny in a very noir way.

You have to slow your car down a little to get a really good look at them (or maybe better to walk). A picture of an old man, his gnarly face blending with the craggy wall of a burned house; Elvis sharing canvass space with another man with a microphone, and a chimp; a woman singing, her body hugging the round concrete of an electrical post; a fading poster of a circa 1960’s car, against an equally faded concrete 70’s bulletin board; a man and woman, locking lips, on the side of a rough wall.

With the flashy sign of every new store claiming sovereignty on the BF landscape, this is a cry for non-conformity, an anti-establishment rant if there ever was one, turning its nose up at the commercialization of a once very, very laid back place. Not that I’m complaining, but it does make me want to go back to the days when heavy traffic only occurred at 7 in the morning, and being drunk meant that you were at a friend’s place, and not, embarrassingly, in a bar.

I personally know the, ahem . . . person (or duo, which seems more plausible to me, because you must have another to get away with) responsible for the art, and I can guarantee that there was a lot of preparation that went into it. The template for the art is very intricate, and not “photo-emulsioned”; rather, cut out from film, painted on the walls, or on paper and then glued. I imagine the installations occurred in the wee hours of the morning, with a car on the standby. I believe I would be doing the same thing, if I didn’t have a day job.

Like any other thing in BF, I hope to see more of these, and I also hope the persons responsible never get caught. I like seeing the unexpected, the things that make me go “Hey, that’s clever.” I like that at the end of a long day, tired and cranky, you get to see a picture of a monkey on an abandoned security outpost, and basking in the irony of it all, you forget about everything else, and have a little laugh.

We did the rounds of BF looking for these gems. Try to identify where these are. Or, if you haven’t seen them yet, keep an eye out for our unusual, er, street art. -ed

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