Julio Austria has a long-term affair with the city – its industrial weaves, strata of “development” and mercurial evolution. And like any affair, he oscillates between affection and frustration. The frames of his works are inhabited by the layers of obsession, somewhat glorifying and dissing urban progress and decay at the same time. In his previous series Concrete and Steel Cosmos, Austria exhibits his keen familiarity of the irregular cityscape, the various veins that run amok as well as the smog and murky waters.
This Way Out, on the other hand, demonstrates a progress in his relationship with the city. As much as he portrays the urban jungle as a space of disarray in his past series, he has captured merely that. His sentiments for a more polished urban landscape have become more defined, more assertive in This Way Out. Here he has chosen to pay heed to railways, roads and the conservation and improvement in infrastructure by portraying spaces outside the urban plot. Austria makes these issues stark by placing the metropolis in its magnificent mess side by side edifices from other settings - such as the suburban, country side, and province – as seen in “Six o'clock Habit” and “Saving the Walls that Could Not Speak.” The former is a scene from Cavite, the church having accompanied him as he grew up, while the other piece refers to the preserved cultural sites of places he has been to abroad. By setting them against the polluted landscape of Manila as Austria knows it, he raises the question of restoration and preservation in the midst of industrial growth.
Attentive to the jolts and discontinuations while moving within the city, Austria reintroduces bold lines crawling ad infinitum through the canvas signifying rail tracks and highways. “Cloverleaf and Railway” as well as “Declogging the Metropolis” display the ground chaos of urban living and how directions and degrees of locomotion criss-cross and overlap one another. The latter work stands as the centerpiece as it makes vivid the overloaded condition of the city, and what it lacks is superimposed at the center: a figure of a horse – a symbol which conveys velocity, power and grace.
The abstract landscape of Austria best portrays his experience of the nebulous metropolis – nebulous being a clash and composite of many urban elements. The layers of the city are captured sharply, as Austria is adept with depth. A flaneur at heart, he allows a muted palette to dominate his frames, somewhat giving the impression of being so immersed in the city regularly that he had learned to dim the explosion of colors in the city. In contrast is the little fragments of heavy saturation – perhaps describing how he sways between his retreat from the city and the development of places outside it.
The reassessment of wide roads and highways is Austria’s plea for efficiency in travel and order in traffic. He draws attention to the horrific city planning of Manila, and urges that proper development be bequeathed to it and especially to the provinces while their pathways are still at an infant stage. In This Way Out, what Austria proposes is to look beyond the city we inhabit in order to fathom the notion of efficiency and better city planning. That is why he turns to other places other than the city.
