For affluent families, the topic of death signals a logistical nightmare. There’s the voluminous paperwork that comes with the disposition of properties, not to mention the wills that will most likely be contested and set off a catena of never-ending estate disputes. But for most people, preparing for or even talking about death is an exercise of privilege. Everyone dies, sure, but one would quickly learn that death isn’t the Great Equalizer it was once thought to be.
This made it difficult for me to view Malipayong Kamatayon: A Happy Death without a preconceived notion of its intentions. Here was a family from Cebu wielding its artistic might, undertaking an entire year to mount a show, transporting a truckload of artworks to Negros to fill an entire floor at Orange Project in Bacolod City—all these to lecture its viewers about a happy death. It was rather bold of sculptor Raymund Fernandez, patriarch of the exhibiting Fernandez family, to be drawing us into his chiseled pieces and instructing us to contemplate on our own mortality.
So it was with some skepticism that I apprehended this authority to facilitate our existential dread. But as to how Fernandez did it, how the sculptor and his show prevailed, it did not happen by accident: death simply persists as a subject of art. It takes one look through the annals of (art) history to reveal death as a preoccupation of the human mind. It’s been personified, mocked, exaggerated, celebrated, fetishized, consecrated—such that every culture boasts no shortage of reminders of our transitory existence. Even far earlier and predating the horrors of colonization, the Manunggul Jar—a Neolithic burial container made to help the soul pass to the other side—sits as a preeminent artifact of the immutability of death.
Adjacent to art, it is religious thought that seems to be most concerned with examining the moral dimension of death. It doesn't surprise me that my first encounter with a Fernandez piece ten years ago was with a work that screams Biblical death: the Crucifix, of tooled copper and wood, installed at the center of Jose Joya Gallery in Cebu. There I learned that religious iconography is built into Fernandez’s sculptures, which have gained notoriety in the local art community as works that look at once polished and unfinished, solemn and subversive. All these was true of the recent exhibit as well, in which the sculptor, operating within but also critical of the strictures of Catholicism, surveyed the breadth of his journey with his family in asking whether there is still merit to wishing ourselves a happy death.
For the exhibition, the sculptor started with a familiar picture. In the titular work, the face of Joseph—the Church’s patron of a happy death—was inscribed in a vertical plank. Its crevices traced the wood’s grain and knots, as if the relief was merely a product of nature taking its course, waiting to be discovered as an archeological miracle. We saw this subtle mastery of the craft again in Panahon—in which the form of the wood appeared like it was rotten by age, excavated from the ground, and came out as a fluid matter frozen in time. Fernandez played with these impressions, adding to the intriguing mystery in the material history of his sculptures, even with the giveaway fact that he likes to work with old wood. He gave us hints: one that sat at the entrance was culled out from a now-defunct sugar cane press, fitting enough to call to mind the complex economic history of the island on which this show stood.
“Imagine a sacred place that is not a church,” prompted Fernandez in his artist’s statement. There is a radical allure to this invitation, coming from an artist whose terms are couched in the language of religion. Fernandez attended the Fine Arts program of the University of the Philippines Cebu following an attempt at completing a degree in mechanical engineering. That was in the seventies, when Cebu’s student population opened the decade with heightened activism, fueled by an import-dependent, export-oriented economy and political instability that eventually set the stage for the one-man Marcosian rule. It was also marked by a lot of things beyond the city: a rise in conceptualism, an energy crisis, a papal visit.
These experiences likely shaped Fernandez’s keen appreciation for the political utility of devotional art. This becomes especially potent when present regimes actively privilege specific narratives of loss, making the reality of death a critical issue. Were there really extralegal executions under martial law? Drug war killings in Duterte’s time? A genocide of Palestinians? There goes the prospect of a happy death, for how can one die in a state of grace when a child elsewhere is stripped of the chance to begin a conscious life. Installed at the far left of the exhibition, the aptly titled Gaza—a video projection of a gunshot on a slab of concrete—made visible this unimaginable violence.
Revelation, it seems, is the ultimate vocation of a sculptor. Fernandez recognizes that each act of carving and gouging out the material is aimed at disclosing its true form. Thus, to sculpt is to exercise an act of faith in the thick of denialism and historical erasure. I saw this as I walked around the perimeter of each piece, fully accessing the often taken for granted three-dimensionality of a sculptural show. Even in the smaller works hope abounded: in the sensuality and passion from Halok: The Kiss, in the bequeathal of knowledge in Ang Pagtudlo sa Anak: The Child's Teaching. The installation work of artist-educator Estela, married to Fernandez, and the series of pencil drawings of Linya, their daughter, served as denouement to this spiritual journey: would it hurt to be defiantly hopeful in the face of moral bankruptcy of our supposed moral authorities?
Indeed, it’s hard to demand accountability from institutions of dogma — dogma that is as enduring as the old wood that makes up the sculptures in A Happy Death. But Fernandez is very much aware that wood, its well-vouched longevity notwithstanding, remains tethered to its precarity as an organic material. The sculptor finds comfort in the perishability of his medium: that his works will eventually have to go back to the soil, buried among the wretched of the earth.
