Ernest Concepcion
by: Charley Cameron | posted: May 4, 2009
Ernest Concepcion is creating a planet: “It’s called Ona, which is the first planet in the universe, one where everything just attacks each other. It’s basically like my brain.”
The imagined epic non-linear narrative of Ona, a planet on which there is a God whose physical form is comprised of the battles he swoops down upon and devours, serves as a substantive resource for Concepcion’s art.
His densely packed drawings and paintings draw the viewer into fantastical representations of violence and conflict. Landscapes, geographies and historical events are attacked with an incredible mishmash of fluid energetic images and characters, which explore and reference anime, science fiction, pop culture, art history, video games, the artifacts of daily life and the childhood urge to conceive of implausible and often impossible worlds.
Concepcion’s 2004 series, The Line Wars, was comprised of over 100 9”x12” drawings. The series came about when he first migrated to the United States from Manila in 2002: “There was so much angst when I moved here. I was stuck in Jersey for two years, it’s so boring and isolated. I couldn’t find a job and I couldn’t find studio space, and all I had were markers and paper. It pushed me to create epic works on a small scale.”
The conflicts of The Line Wars came from a variety of sources, from squirrels and ants in the green suburban monotony of New Jersey, his “current states, and from actual childhood experiences, based on cartoons, video games I would play at that time, or based on a movie.”
The result was a series in which various elements from the typically mundane to the fantastical were pitted against one another with mounting absurdity; from tables embarking on a siege against chairs to priests brandishing bibles at an army praying mantids, to giant fried eggs pitted against some rather irate St Benedicts, all represented “in your face, at the moment of battle.”
The references to childhood recur throughout Concepcion’s work. The Line Wars was displayed with an audio component; Concepcion recorded himself making sound effects for the battles taking place on the wall: a crash, ka-pow. For acoustic reasons, he recorded them in a bathroom, only to be reminded later that as a child he would spend abnormally long periods of time in the bathtub creating battlegrounds, pitting running water against toy soldiers. It’s perhaps not surprising that Concepcion now teaches art in an after-school program and once had a job rating video games.
As his art practice progressed, Concepcion began to develop larger works. “Although I wouldn’t lose the drawing element, I wanted to add more depth and almost go back to traditional art making, which is as tacky as landscape.” Unusually, and indicative of his lack of pretension and embrace of popular culture, Concepcion is a painter who actually admits that “Bob Ross is one of my heroes,” in addition to his clear appreciation for artists such as Darger and Bosch.
Once he has painted a saturated, dramatic, fine-art realm landscape, Concepcion embarks on a process he considers to be “attacking really…with the landscapes it’s real, but I attack it with drawing, and with the photographs I put my own thing in it.”
In the painting Torpedo Bomber vs. Wasps (2006), Concepcion recreated an Edward Steichen photograph of a World War II attack, and then took advantage of Steichen’s sparse composition, seeing it as “just perfect for me to put a giant wasp, it’s perfect for my ‘what if’ alternate universe.” Similarly, his landscapes are transformed into battlefields for monochromatic depictions of fantastical warfare.
In Concepcion’s collaborative work, most recently in the Kangarok series with Mike Estabrook under the guise of The Shining Mantis, he develops his “what-if” universe even further. Their first work, a large scale chalk mural which covered a 135-foot wall in the then newly rebuilt WTC Tower 7 came out of a process in which Estabrook and Concepcion would each draw their own armies “and we would meet at some point and attack.”
Prohibited from depicting certain topics by those who commissioned the work, the two took full advantage of the realm of the absurd. Kangarok I included ants engaged in an orgy, as burning dragons crashed into buildings and praying mantises with nails through their hands clutched at rosaries. Then there were the demonic kangaroos: “We’re such complete nerds. Ragnarok is the apocalypse for the Vikings, when all their gods clash for this final epic judgment day, we had to call it Kangarok.” In context, one has to wonder if this bears any reference to the online video game, which adopts the name of the Viking judgment day.
Concepcion describes his process as “liberating.” When he began these drawings upon his immigration to the US, he made a move towards doing what “stimulated” him. It was a departure from what he describes as the “conceptual, smart-art” he had created during his time at college in the Philippines.
Equally, he remains adamant that he does not draw from socio-political events, rather from pop-culture. He recognizes that “people put this political aspect into it,” adding “I like these responses from people, but then again I’m not really concerned with it.” It would appear that, to him, his fantastical reference points allow for an escape from the real-world parallels that a viewer might expect from a contemporary artist with a penchant for apocalyptic imagery.
Or, as he described of one work Residual Legion (and the great escape from Englewood), in which there is a large imagined skyscraper, “people had trouble accepting this work; they thought it looked like the World Trade Center.” He makes clear that this was not his intent, and it is hard to tell quite what he is conceding when he states “there is a UFO crashing through it, but, y’know, it’s a friggin’ UFO.”
This is not to suggest, however, that his work is naïve, far from it. While he quite sincerely avoids any suggestions of political intent in conflict imagery created during a war, it’s hard not to consider that he may be engaged in some level of Brechtian cleverness. He engages his audience with a liberated creative process and fantastical elements that many have long since forgotten, and leaves us to create our own narratives, outside of but drawn from his own intricate world.
Concepcion is preparing for a solo show in NYC later this year, creating “good-enough-to-eat nuclear explosions.” Based on photographs of actual explosions, he considers the images to be a natural progression of his conflict imagery. However, rather than furiously pitting elements against one another, he captures a real-world force with the strength to end the battle. Concepcion describes the enamel paintings as “glossy… they’re sweet looking, they’re cute, they’re like cotton candy,” though he emphasizes, “the actual image is like death.”
