Necro Deco

Miguel Aquilizan is a sculptor of Filipinx heritage who pro-

duces large assemblages from a diverse range of materials and

found objects. A sense of the marvellous permeates his work,

as opposites collide: order and chaos, permanence and imper-

manence, organic and inorganic, old and new, made and found,

life and death. This disintegration of binaries is an engulfing

sight, pulling audiences into an other wordly experience.

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Indeed, entering his gallery is like stepping into a

junkyard hell, where Jake and Dinos Chapman’s gothic extrav-

agances meet the ad hoc sensibilities of the developing world.

It’s the dark messiness clashing with orderliness that inspires

this effect. An image of a post-art-school Lucifer—who greets

lost souls at thegates of his forsaken realm and gathers

debris to birth abominable minions during an economic

collapse—comes to mind. For the devil certainly strikes me as

obsessive and meticulous. Mutant plants securing oxygen for

the gasping breaths of the damned (and desperately seeking

solace in the discomforts of contemporary art) are part of this

apocalyptic daydream.

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Often elevated on complex wooden plinths, Aquilizan’s

sculptures suggest otherworldly totems and sci-fi cemetery

monuments. The most prominent is Post Vitruvius, a freakish

reimagining of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—with a

macabre tail—made from two human skeletons. (Plastic ones,

don’t worry.) Located in the centre of the gallery, inhabiting

it with menace, it’s surrounded by other unearthly entities,

creating a dense panorama of monstrosity. But there’s also

harmony in the chaos, with a paradoxical sense of beauty,

balance, and delicacy.

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Aquilizan’s work conjures with life and death. Some works

are anthropomorphic, coming alive by mimicking the human

form. Venustasis stands on wooden legs, like a person. The

legs support a full-length mirror in which you can see your

own body reflected. In the centre of the mirror is a plastic

mamey fruit split open, resembling a cyclops with a sweet iris.

Other works are deadly. In Zohar Manifestation No. 2,

a skull is renderedin plaster to resemble dripping candle

wax, as if marking the passage of time in a demonic ritual.

The looming faceless sentinel Prospero bears a red fruit

in its chest like a sacred heart, evoking a tropical Jesus in a

black robe. It casts its shadow against the gallery door behind,

reminding us that we are next in mortality’s line.

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It’s serendipitous that this year is the centenary of André

Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, inspiring exhibitions around

the world that revisit surrealism through the lens of the Global

South. I’m reminded of the famous story of Breton in México,

commissioning a table from a local carpenter by providing

a sketch of what he wanted in perspective. The carpenter

took it literally and produced a flat object, rather than a

table. According to legend, Breton threw up his hands, declaring

México a surrealist country par excellence. In my view, the

carpenter was likely fucking with Breton, who must have

displayed an irritating Frenchness, a control-freaky and elitist

demeanour, that incited a prank.

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This tale exemplifies surrealism’s exoticising relation-

ship with its ‘primitive’ others, and how the others laugh

back. Aquilizan’s imagination—disorienting, heterogenous,

and noir—recalls that carpenter’s aberrant reading. Like the

carpenter, he seems to defy logic and offer strange interpreta-

tions of conventional forms. He reinscribes a global message

of Western consumption through reconfigurations of material

excess, as if mishearing contemporary tenets of disposabil-

ity. It is a mockery of capitalist values and their reliance on

excess. Every time we put out hard waste for kerbside collec-

tion in Australia, these works are laughing at us.

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Aquilizan’s mysticism reflects complex belief structures

in the Philippines, where Indigenous practices have fused with

Catholicism. Its pre-colonial culture invested in animism—

the idea that objects possess a spirit. Perhaps this accounts

for the artist’s sensitivity to the life of objects, which seem

enchanted, on the brink of motion. Or perhaps he is breathing

life into them as if through occult means, suggesting the

Catholic imagination, where objects can be possessed by

human souls that have exited the body. In Aquilizan’s work,

I see horror infused with local sensibilities.

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The Philippines—where recycling is a cultural necessity

born from precarity—inspire exquisite corpses, which is

why found objects are key components in Aquilizan’s work.

He takes things home and lives with them, allowing their souls

to rise to the surface, then he takes them to his basement

studio and messes with them. Things are domesticated

upstairs, then defamiliarised downstairs, becoming uncanny

figures, as if invoking the occult dictum ‘as above, so below’.

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