Silverlens Galleries present: White Spirit, an exhibition by Gaston Damag. Ever the impish sceptic, Gaston Damag’s White Spirit expectedly takes him across treacherous ground pimpled by generational and transcultural mishaps, each homecoming trip from France to the Philippines inevitably stirring up questions on continuities and discontinuities. As a likely consequence of being away for the better part of four decades, Damag is squarely of a generation that refuses to simply live with colonial baggage given how acute the dissonance gets each time he lands here. The conflicted nature of these re-entry episodes this time comes directly referenced by fiction conveniently tagged postcolonial--Paule Constant’s White Spirit, the narrative of which turns on the circulation of a corrosive bleach that on one hand tends to aspirations toward Caucasian skin as it ‘sanitizes’, but also wipes out material trace. 

One unintended ironic twist to the White Spirit reference was something I pointed out to Damag—that is, that museum conservators in the Philippines use white spirit to clean up decaying or soiled art. As his own physical journey for this project takes him home to Banaue on a quest for fake antiques he eventually ‘violates’—overpaints, pierces, et al., and how in the process, everyone (artist included) gets irreparably rendered complicit in tinkering with such charged notions as ritual and tradition, Damag’s attempted critique gets arguably blunted by compromised subjectivities. While fully aware of how his own musings easily succumb to market machinations—how his posed pranks could very well too easily get trivialized into tourist trinkets over time, Damag dares on—“walking on a blade of a razor,” as he himself puts it. Self-conscious of his own propensity to nostalgia while earnestly, albeit desperately tending to a nagging sense of phantom culture, the questions he asks remain compelling and poignant.

-Words by Eileen Legaspi Ramirez