NSIDE his Calaca, Batangas studio, balikbayan Filipino painter Raul Deodato Arellano was drawing and painting without reference, emulating both surrealist automatism’s celebration of the unconscious and pareidolia’s salute to the conscious mind’s cognitive abilities. This was during preparations for Island, his first show at Altro Mondo Arte Contemporanea Creative Space in San Antonio, Makati, which opened last Saturday, October 2, in the gallery's Spazio Franco. Arellano has been excited with his new collection's paying tribute to that early 20th-century automatist method, acknowledging that it actually still works today towards making one wonder as well as feel challenged.
    To be specific, while surrealism is often associated with a rejection of so much consciousness, Arellano is amused by his finding that the clichéd automatist act, or such an art school-ish exercise as exploring the canvas with various shapes, can still seriously massage the mind towards an inevitable sense of reason that’s almost detective-like or semiotic or simply symbolist in its natural trajectory. In short, it leads one to a desire for order. It would seem, then, that the relationship between surrealist automatism and a Mari Kondo-esque sensibility for comfort and reason is more symbiotic than immiscible. The one (surrealist automatism) leads to the other (reason), and perhaps, as by the habits of pareidolia, conversely.
    Through this new exercise on more than six paintings, therefore, Arellano has allowed himself to see the connections between things that did not seem to be connected before, or between art history events that would often be presented as conflicting paradigms. And, voila! Inside this process, Arellano realized that the old surrealist automatist approach that’s supposedly the cliché that it is as per the categorizations of museum curators—an archaic modernist-period expression of the unconscious rejecting expressions of the concept, although that "unconscious expression" is still what motors the actions of living improvisers on park skateboards or jazz trumpets—actually still appeals to the mind very much the way a scattered Lego set or collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces on a floor today would. Even though these scattered 3D or two-dimensional abstract "objects" may be said to be generating new perceptions for an altro mondo mindspace (an "out of this world" mindspace), their entropic theatrics would  nevertheless appeal as stimuli to man’s big nature to create new metaphors (including religious metaphors).
    And so Arellano ends up seeming to pay tribute here to what have been called the post-surrealists of 1930s Southern California (the area where Arellano has spent many years of his life living in before finally coming back to the Philippines to farm and paint). These California artists, as it turns out, were some of those who exploited during their time the surrealist ambition for symbolist inevitabilities, either as rebellion to surrealism’s pretenses or as an awakening to its potential for man’s conceptual nature. A journey, then, from surrealism’s and Dadaism’s paranoia to a more accepting 1930s American pareidolia.
    Of course, however, Arellano would not spell out for you what conscious narratives can be extracted from, say, Self-Portrait, a jumble of modernist shapes that also Picasso-esquely morph into verily referential shapes (two obvious human feet down there, a guitar up there where a guitar should be inside a torso shape, and then, good Lord, a literal cock near this emerging human shape’s groin!). But Arellano’s appropriation of the Cubist merging of the abstract and the referential―one could actually say it’s an appropriation of so many similar modernist outcomes―explodes here anew as the balikbayan artist’s paean, finally, to the complementary existence of two often divided areas of creative production.