Possiting Possibilities
Rom Villaseran usually paints pictures in his head. But for once, he is putting them on show.
It is a few weeks before Lunar goes on exhibit. Apparently, today is a free day. A workday for multi-medium artist Rom Villaseran takes simple form: Paint all day. Or experiment all day. “There are days that I have to go out because I have to experience the world outside. It can’t be based all on vicarious experiences.”
“I don’t go out!” Rom insists. “Four months ago, when the show was being scheduled, I looked at my pictures and my files, I looked at all my works here at the studio. I realized that I wasn’t really pushing myself. This is not it, there’s so much more. I changed everything, I changed my lifestyle.”
At age six, his mom gifted him with a set of books on artists. “It was inevitable,” Rom muses about his becoming an artist, reminiscing on how he grew up with Rembrandt and his contemporaries.
He had previously been at UST taking Architecture, only to become unhappy with the course. New York became his next stop where he took art classes at community colleges and galleries. He came back to Manila, tried out for the UP Fine Arts program, got in and then, finding the pace to slow and the lifestyle too laidback, eventually grew out of it. “It was starting to become not a conducive environment for me to push myself forward. I was always hungry for so much more.”
Outside of the academic environment, things started changing. “The first month I got out, I met the band Cheese. They were coming out with an album. It was a good start.” To his credit, he has designed album covers for Cheese, Greyhoundz, and Wolfgang. These, along with other graphic design jobs, were mere projects, a bit of a distraction and digression from the editorial work Rom would eventually buckle down to creating.
Meanwhile, his experimentations led him to learning how to fuse various media: charcoal, ballpen, watercolor, acrylic, photography. “The computer has proven to be a very important medium for me. My growth and understanding on mixed-medium works accelerated to a faster pace. What used to take me three days to accomplish manually now takes me three minutes to render digitally. I have to stress that the computer is just another medium, nothing more. I still prefer doing things with my own hands for it seems more human to me.”
Finally, in August 2001, his first one-man show started taking shape. Work on Matadora began as early as late 1999, growing to become a collection of 30-32 large and small pieces, all in mixed-medium (charcoal, acrylic, pen and ink, photo and paper scraps, print-outs all fusing with each other.). It was launched in July 2002 in Ad Infinitum Gallery, handled by Ed Soler. Rom describes the works as “dark and brutal. It was a series of paintings that were based on friends and paintings I created, based on real people and based on real places that I fused in my head. So it was more surreal.”
March 2003 saw the opening of Lunar, at Gallerie Astra; it was introduced last September by the Pre-Lunar exhibit at Big Sky Mind to bridge the new series with the introspective Matadora. With the 24-piece Lunar he attempts to look at the world around him and present his view of the society he finds himself in. “Things that may seem illogical and magical to common theory happens at night and outside the safe walls of the city. Lunar has less angst in it. And it isn’t as dark either. It doesn’t attack you anymore. It simply invites you, haunting you.”
Rom restrains himself from talking about his next series in between comments on “endless possibilities” and using lightboxes and being excited. Sitting with him in the early afternoon at his home-studio presents a contradictory image: the meek-looking twenty-eight-year-old artist in the midst of powerful visions.
“It is for the benefit of the future Filipino generations that we should devote our works. This gives them a better launch pad when their time comes, so that they may further what little national pride we Filipinos have. I am no longer simply driven nor inspired. I am far beyond driven. It puts me to bed at 11 p.m. It wakes me up at 5:30 a.m. It pushes me to see past the difficulties of money, friends, lovers and, at times, war. In the past, I have excelled in developing my insecurities and so I pampered my selfishness. This new frame of mind keeps me level-headed. Most of all, it keeps me very focused in my work. I still make disastrous mistakes, yet it seems I’m able to breathe better now.”
published in Preview, May 2003
