Featuring a cast of vibrant childlike creatures in an imaginary world with real consequences of loss and suffering, Froilan Calayag presents a tour de force painting exhibition that meditates on the notion of time, innocence, magic and prophecy, uncertainty and renewal, fantasy versus reality, and symbolic power in “Return of the Gifted.”

Paintings with sweet colorful characters tinged with idiosyncratic irony have become Calayag’s aesthetic signature. The viewer finds himself suspended in disbelief, as he witnesses the very same adorable creatures pounce, rip, stab, and tear out the hearts of rival beings for ownership of the imagination, of the dream, of the gift. In fact these innocuous looking characters that hide behind the façade of cuteness and gaiety belie the truth of their actions through random excursions of violence and betrayal. Perhaps this is Calayag’s nod to life’s complex shades of joy and its chromatic fugues of pain. In this unpredictable landscape of complex emotions and experiences, things alter their appearances: hands elongate to form ridges of a mountain, a mountain in the form of a female body, a large heart with frightening jaws of death housing innocents inside, or so they seem, in this malleable state of existence. This morphing world speaks much about Calayag’s practice of oil painting, where each stroke becomes a soft murmur of the heart that pumps blood bringing life into the brain, firing the imagination. Painting then captures the slowness of time as it is lived in the fullness of the moment. It is when time stops to allow the mind to expand, to allow consciousness to drift, to return to a time of bliss. According to Calayag, painting has provided him the only possible moment that reclaims that lost feeling of childhood, of innocence lost. In this forever magical moment, the painter conjures a world that only belongs to him, with symbols and figures that create their own narrative, weaving fantastic episodes that might portend of things to come or things to be. Thus by doing so, the artist reclaims the lost mantle of prophetic messenger, which stretches back to the dawn of humanity, as man becomes aware of his place in the world bearing a gift that allows him to cast the world according to his imagination, dreaming a world that can be made better through his craft, ultimately sharing this gift with others to make their dreams into a reality.

Arvin Flores