The genesis of the Mona Lisa Project was a chat held over a cup of coffee.
Visual artist Soler Santos and his wife, Mona, wondered why, over the years they spent together, they didn’t have souvenir items based on Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous work.
“We didn’t have any keychains, or things like that,” Santos said, “but we had friends who were artists. So we asked, why don’t we commission works based on the Mona Lisa?” It was an inspiring idea, and it begat inspiration.
The result is a new exhibit that opened at the CCP Small Gallery on Wednesday night. The Mona Lisa project brings together 57 different interpretations of da Vinci’s most famous work by some of the most interesting contemporary artists in the country.
The brief for each artist was to interpret the work in their own style, often taking into account their understanding of the work, its context, and its resonances in the wider culture.
While all the artists represented are from a particular tendency in Philippine contemporary art, the results are as diverse as the group represented in the room.
Nona Garcia’s faceless Mona Lisa hangs across a paint-by-numbers deconstruction/diptych by Roberto Chabet, a periodic presence in West Gallery’s exhibit line-up. (The gallery was the co-presenter of the show, ongoing till June.)
Most of the works reflect the particular concerns and styles of their creators, including the collage work of The Manila Review’s artistic director Carina Santos, the almost-alien fantastic face of Froilan Calayag, and the recent pop-art tendencies of Dex Fernandez.
One work that struck me that night was Tanya Villanueva’s interpretation, which was a photo collage that had writing in Hindi all over it. The artist told me that it was the result of a Google image search where she discovered an Indian film star whose stage name was Mona Lisa—Antara Biswas of West Bengal. The work is based on the photo collage of search results typically given by the search engine.
But one of the larger works in the exhibition was a piece by Kawayan de Guia. It was based on one of those Mona Lisa reproductions he saw in a tourist spot in Baguio. “It was one of those paintings that you could stick your face in and be Mona Lisa in Baguio,” he told Coconuts Manila in an email interview, adding that its crudeness was indeed its charm.
After buying the painting, he left it alone for three years and ended up highlighting how she was a muse for da Vinci by means of her smile. “[I chose] to take off her face…and blow up her eye[s] and smile,” he said. Kawayan has already done a
homage to da Vinci in the past, reproducing “Leonardo’s Horse” using celluloid trumpets.
Once a Facebook photo album kept by Santos, with new works being added as they were completed, the exhibition now takes its place as a site of possible dialogue between a distant past and a dynamic present. But it looks like the dialogue of inspiration is not over. When I told another visual artist about the show, he told me, “I actually have a homage to Mona Lisa, a diptych.” And the stories continue.
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The Mona Lisa Project exhibit is at the Amorsolo (small) gallery on the fourth floor of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. It is ongoing until 16 June.
Ren Aguila is a contributing writer on arts and cultural affairs for a number of online publications.
Photo: Kawayan de Guia
