Business Mirror
October 1, 2008

How is an everyday object transformed into a work of art? An object may gain status through time in the same way that wisdom is often ascribed to age. A modest table or chair can turn into fine antique in many years. But not all objects are privileged to acquire such status. A rusty nail, spring or scrap metal, for instance, will never become priceless antiques and do not command center stage in the drama of everyday life. While many recognize these objects’ importance in the assembly line, they are merely part of something larger and are discarded once their usefulness expires. Pete Jimenez’s sculptures afford these seemingly insignificant objects the chance to undergo a transfiguration. From their humble origins in junkyards, they are given new lease in life and elevated into the status of “art.” These found objects are given formal coherence, expressive character and embodied with a “concept” in the hands of this talented artist.

Usually working without preliminary sketch, Jimenez allows his imagination to work spontaneously as he fashions them into beautiful art pieces. He starts with a single piece of material then adds another piece that has been welded onto another until the whole thing takes shape much like a collage. An arresting piece he made, entitled Instant Mami, consists of twisted round bars which were crushed and welded together to form a large rectangular shape reminiscent of the compacted dried noodles one finds inside a pack of instant noodles. Cathedral Window is made up of the body of nails without the head, bent and shaped into triangles. A recent piece, entitled After Shave, is made from an automobile spring and a cut-up liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder with welded nails scattered on top, reminding one of stubbles left after shaving. Reviewing his works, one feels that Jimenez has breathed life into these inanimate objects. Many of his sculptures have been treated anthropomorphically. The cut –up LPG cylinder has suggested the head of Lola with open curls on top, or Mom with tighter and closed curls, of Batman with a Walkman, or of “Mr. Chairman” decked literally with the back of a wrought iron chair on top.

Another way by which found objects may be transformed into works of art is through labeling. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, transformed ready-mades into art by conveniently changing the labels. Unlike Duchamp’s “urinal” reborn as a “fountain,” Jimenez’s works do not attempt to conceal the origins of his humble pieces. His labels are appropriated from popular terms, often injecting local humor in the texts’ corruption of English words, such as Carabao English to label a sculpture that looks like a carabao; Is Knob (snob) to describe a piece made of knobs and metal; and Petal Attraction (Fatal Attraction) for a floral piece made of parts from a Volkswagen Beetle. His adroit verbal play is exemplified in titles like pusa(kal), a work made from the discarded parts of an old Singer sawing machine shaped to look like a cat; or Tupperware Party, which consists of a series of cut-up pipes whose hollow circular shapes look like the top of different sizes of food keepers.

The commonplace is highlighted by many labels such as Mango Shake, a moving, swinging piece that shakes when tapped and is made of round bars which are bent and twisted to take the shape of two interlocking outlines of a mango. A small piece, entitled Google Earth, looks like a transparent earth with little extended arms. According to Jimenez, the piece also looks like a lunar module or spaceship, and the little arms are like “motion speed lines that make you zoom in and out of earth.” A particularly interesting work is a brown vertical metal piece with holes, entitled Who ate my Toblerone? Jimenez’s works and their labels are also exercises on semiotic reading. Askal (stray dog) is a three-legged canine made of wood, ax and the wheels of delivery carts that look like a trike. The trike becomes indexical of a stray dog whose leg was run over by speeding cars along the highway. According to Jimenez, he conjures up the labels in the process of making his sculptures-sometimes half way through, while at other times “the work sits still for weeks without label.” Indeed, what gives life to his visual images are the verbal puns that accompany them. While Jimenez asserts that the works should be able to stand on their own, the labels have become part and parcel of his creations and give them a comic character, adding wit and vitality to each piece.

Jimenez relates that after a work is welded and he is truly satisfied with the result, he exposes it to the elements and “…in due time, it gathers a textural treatment that can only be done in nature.” Corrosion and the metal’s reaction to the various elements give his works a beautiful patina. The natural patina reminds us that these sculptures remain a part of everyday life; they do not rear their heads like monsters in new and shiny garbs but ubiquitously assert their “everydayness.” Paradoxically, therefore, while the found objects are transformed into art, we cannot help but recognize, in the words of W.J. T. Mitchell, “…the plain old thing with its homely, familiar name…., blushing and smirking at us in the spotlight of aesthetic attention, or ignoring us totally.” But why are we, as viewers, mesmerized by Jimenez’s works? While Jimenez takes his inspiration from Picasso’s assemblage works, the context in which these works were received is no longer viable. The surrealist deployment of the found object caused “shock” among the viewers as the uncanny was made to take the place of art. Today, however, we do not view Jimenez’s works with mouth agape, horrified by these humble objects’ apotheosis. We are rather drawn to them because the everyday objects assert a reality tangible enough for us to experience. In an age where reality is virtual, Jimenez’s sculptures comfort us with the knowledge that we can continue to see, feel and touch objects.

Philippine Daily Inquirer
September 15, 2008
Lifestyle Section

Pete Jimenez’s scrap metal sculptures are shot through with energy and wit-maybe because he has such a great time making them.

“It looked like an insect,” says Federico “Pete” Jimenez. “I still remember.” The artist is talking about the very first metal sculpture he ever made from found objects, an “experimental” assignment for his class with National Artist Napoleon Abueva, at the University of the Philippines College of fine Arts, where he graduated in 1982 as a Visual Communications major. Then Jimenez pulls out a pen and begins to draw the work from memory on a paper napkin, an assemblage of metal gears, with one jagged ring cut in two to make curving antennae for a round head. So where is the historic piece now? “I can’t find it,” he says, with a bemused shrug. “I think my father sold it for scrap.” It’s just the kind of matter-of-fact reality check that keeps the talented Jimenez terribly grounded. “I don’t think I have any angst,” he says with a chuckle. “Well, maybe I have some inside me, but it’s definitely not the dark kind.” There’s the fact that the scrap-metal vendors who know him very well as a regular suki can’t figure out why he wants ugly stuff instead of shiny new metal. Youngest daughter Julia, 8, once described her father’s work as mainly “ayun, pukpok-pukpok, pako-pako” (hammer-hammer, nail-nail). Then there’s also the fact that, as manager of the post production house Optima, Jimenez has a day job that’s filled with stress, deadlines, and a lot of the self-depreciating humor that you’d expect from folks in the advertising industry. (His colleagues like to call him bakal boy.)

Humor

The humor is evident in both Jimenez’s actual works and the tongue-in-cheek titles he gives them. Thus, when friends learned that this amiable husband and father of two- the older daughter is Frances, 11-entitled his latest one-man show “Nail Spa,” they knew he was referring to machine parts, not manicures-although he does finish the pieces with a weatherproof topcoat. (The show is ongoing until Sept. 16 in West gallery at SM Megamall.) The nails in question are the large, rough metal specimens that held down old wooden railroad ties, and which Jimenez bought by the sackful at P5 per nail some years back. “I don’t have a studio, so I work in my garage, and those sacks were just dumped there,” he says. “Everyday, the nails would look at me, torturing me, telling me, ‘O, when are you going to use us?’” Considering that the 48-year-old Jimenez used to work as an animator for production houses-he apprenticed with the late great Larry Alcala-one can just imagine what those taunting critters looked like in his mind’s eye. In adspeak, the nails became Jimenez’s “creative handle,” leading to such whimsical pieces as “Twister,” nails popping out of a large spring; “Soldiers,” a tight bunch of nails of different textures and heights, all capped with heads that look like World War II helmets; and “Meeting,” a bowl fringed with nails facing each other over some implied conference table. There are other pieces that depart from the theme, like “Mango Shake,” a metal rod shaped into the outline of the fruit and mounted on a spring to keep it perpetually bouncing, a tabletop treat. Indeed, because of the movement in the lines and the placement of the details, you know the pieces are solid steel-but you expect them to suddenly jump, transform, or do something else, like a flash of light or a sci-fi creature come to life. (Speaking of sci-fi, check out the piece “Mr. Roboto,” another springy alien.) The 20-odd pieces in the show range from tile-size wall hangings and tabletop accents, to large standing sculpture and the aforementioned spring-powered jiggling works. All were made from hammered pieces of scrap metal and steel objects Jimenez found on his weekend “pamamalengke” (marketing) trips to the junkyards in Antipolo and Quezon City.

More Discriminating

Over the years, Jimenez admits, ever since his one-man show in 2000, he has learned to be more discriminating “shopper” when he heads out to the junkyards. “For my first two or three shows, I would hoard everything I saw,” he recounts. “My wife Lissa would complain that the mess was becoming an eyesore.” Now he zooms in on anything that looks different or interesting, whether it’s a big, battered old wok he fashioned into moon-shaped wall piece, or a bunch of unusual nuts and bolts he piled onto a curved, free standing pole to stimulate the vertebrae on a human spine. (Title: “Everything ISpine.”) “That’s why I’m always excited about my ‘shopping’ trips,” Jimenez says with a glee. “I never know what I’m going to find.” He is also always on the lookout for “moments that don’t happen often,” like the time he was driving home to Fairview and passed a group of scrap-metal workers by the side of the road, vigorously hammering the shell of an old Volkswagen Beetle. Jimenez screeched to a stop. “They were going to weigh the parts to be sold for scrap, and I ended up buying them the entire thing, including the bumpers.” The curved fenders ended up as the petals of a huge standing flower in an imposing work called “Petal Attraction,” which is featured along with some of Jimenez’s other works in the book “The world of Best Art,” a folio on selected Filipino artists recently published in New York. Most finds end up on top of his work table, a Lazy Susan on which he welds components together, constantly spinning to see the work-in-progress from all angles. He’d put things together without sketches and studies in a method known as direct sculpture, adding, subtracting, bending, and breaking as he goes, and always listening to what the pieces tell him. That’s why fellow artist Rock Drilon once noted that Jimenez was effective largely because he never violated the basic forms of objects. Only experience has taught Jimenez to discern whether or not a piece is finished-“something they don’t teach you in college,” he muses-and even that could still change. “I could be happy with something, sleep on it, and then take it apart and start all over again the next day.” Some works take a weekend, others take several weeks of agonizing-not because of intense emotions, but because Jimenez likes to work fast and only feels satisfied after the execution. “And then I feel rested. Sarap ng feeling.” Sometimes, he’ll see something instantly, and will have a name for the piece from the get-go. Other times, the work will sit unchristened for weeks. Right now, there are more critters sitting in his garage and taunting Jimenez anew: sacks full of used wooden shoe molds. A new material? “I still have to see.” He has several ideas for more functional works for a future show-which means the molds have been doing a lot of talking. Still, because he’s got a life, Jimenez’s weekend creative process can always be interrupted by lunch with the family, or errands he has to run for Lissa. “Don’t ask me for an artistic statement,” Jimenez says with a laugh. “I just like to have fun, recycle things, find something that will challenge me. It’s a freewheeling thing.” “Despite the weight of these sculptures, they project a deceiving weightlessness and an airy majesty,” writes Cid Reyes of Jimenez’s work in “The World of Best Art.” “The works, however, do not take themselves seriously, but rather wink in knowing, conspiratorial eye at the viewer.” The best part is, after delighting in Pete Jimenez’s ingenuity, you’ll feel like winking back.