Retro is a reductionist way of putting it. With the call-to-innovation in the visual arts on hyper-drive (unlike, sadly, in the literary arts, where critical praise equals the amount of moss you gather), one occasionally turns to the old for the production of something new. Say, the way a DJ samples Existing melodies to create a collage of unexpected rhythms, weaving together from drab strands fresh sonic tapestries. Or the way Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara takes yesteryear's newspaper, cuts it up into individual words, randomly reassembling everything towards a new poem.

Another way of putting it is this: There is nothing new, and there is nothing old. There are only machines. Amorsolo’s mimetic gifts via deft manipulation of light renders him a classical photo-copying machine. Which is no insult just as it is no praise: we are beyond such paltry aesthetic/value judgements, though never beyond the interminable flow of intensities that connect him to more and more machinery, more and more flows and potential lines of flight.

And he is not even a single machine just as each of us is no single machine. Amorsolo is a multiplicity—not “amor solo,“ but “amores muchos”—a molecular collective with neither tangible bounds nor intangible limits. True, we can always resort to a merely molar genealogy, content with roots and diagrammatic trees: Try, for example, reading the show in purely Oedipal terms: Young artists, fearful of castration, usurp the throne—the phallus, the hard and swollen amor solo—and head towards Mother Art, alas!

But all this talk about organs is making us nauseous. Too cheeky, too easy. We prefer the rhizomatic to the arboreal. We prefer ridding Amorsolo of his organs—towards a deterritorialization that turns him into a Body without Organs. And how to jack the idea up if not by jacking his machinery into more machines—eleven, in fact—each in turn also jacked into each other as they jack themselves off to mechanical jouissance?

Machine 1. Allan Balisi's "Gray" is anything but gray. While it does retain the somber quality of Amorsolo's original self-portrait, it drops the technical application of light for which the Amorsolo-machine (AM) was known. Balisi appropriates what had been intended to be an objectively crafted portrait into a subjective portrayal, infusing it instead with colors that have come to be associated with the rest of his youthful oeuvre.

Machine 2. Robert Caringal reveals a similar fascination with the AM's use of light. But rather than simply downplaying it, his work removes any depiction of light in favor of installing a real source of it: a fluorescent bulb that makes literal the AM's technique of backlighting. Backlit hence and menacingly large, the entire work is a metonym for the scope of the AM’s influence on Philippine art at large.

Machine 3. With "Steel Burning," Don Dalmatio ironizes his classical penchant for still life. With the use of verbo-visual punning (from "still" to "steel"), Dalmatio uncovers a sense of humor in what used to be the static though masterful still lives of the AM, burning off their facades of seriousness and painstaking craft.

Machine 4. "New Image" by Randalf Dilla is an artistic stab in the back. Even as it seems to appropriate the realism of the AM and imbue it with old-school symbolism with the use of visual metaphors, it portrays an intellectual desire to move from more traditional modes of painting to more modern ones of art. And this is accomplished, paradoxically, with the use of traditional painting.

Machine 5. "Tears of Manila" by Robert Shook brings to mind the infamous contest between Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. While the former was able to fool birds with his realistic depiction of grapes, the latter was able to fool the former himself with his depiction of drapes which Zeuxis thought to be real. Here, however, the depicted drapes are just as fake as the painting underneath—yet another depiction of another depiction: the AM’s "Burning of Manila"—and hence so are the emotions that surround the landscape in ruins. Could the jester too have been fooled by his own tears, by the supposed sincerity of mimesis and realism? Did he really think he was more real than what he was gazing at?
 
Machine 6. The diptych "Liberty Bonding" by Dina Gadia unveils a different aspect of the AM. Once accused by critics of having overly commercialized his art, the AM too had done his share of commissioned work, such as posters advertising liberty bonds. It is this practical yet classical
artist Gadia 'bonds' with—Amorsolo the adman—whose work not only involved aesthetically depicting the banal, but also banalizing the idea of depiction while simultaneously aestheticizing the banal.

Machine 7. Mark Salvatus, true to his growing reputation as a graffiti artist, defaces the AM to astonishing (non-)aesthetic results. "Sunday Morning" is a reaction to the older painter's "Going to Town." Where one figuratively becomes faceless in a crowd, Salvatus renders everyone literally faceless when each comes in contact with another, even in the simple act of journeying. Is one's identity not compromised or displaced when s/he is made to fit a mass of people?

Machine 8. Costantino Zicarelli's "Pathetic Act of a Meaningless Destructive Violence" is exactly what it says it is: a pathetic act of a meaningless destructive violence—the violence being that of juxtaposing not just two distant timelines (the AM’s and Zicarelli's) but two different cultures (the AM is Filipino, well-educated in Philippine art history; Zicarelli is half-Italian, his knowledge of Philippine art history limited) as well. What is parodied as pathetic isn't the quality of his reproductions of Amorsolo originals—intentionally haphazard vis-a-vis the AM’s careful craft—but the very idea of attempting to reproduce the irreproducible.

Machine 9. Tatong Recheta Torres' "The Unfinished Offering of a Beautiful Head" thrives on tension: that between the aforementioned realism of the AM and Torres' own brand of hyper-(sur)realism, and, more importantly, that between the painting and the painting-in-progress. Just as no historical image of Amorsolo is ever truly complete, neither is any of his work, given the complex shifts in context it exists in over the years. And this is played off by Torres by finalizing—immortalizing—the very incompletion of a head begun by the AM.

Machine 10. The maps to “One Love” which is really Amorsolo Street in Makati City is Angelo V. Suarez’s way of furthering the intended machinization process. Collaborating with anonymous drawing machines all over the city, Suarez attempts to deterritorialize Amorsolo the man by paradoxically reterritorializing—quite literally so—Amorsolo the place. After all, the man and the place are both on a single plane of consistency, and the maps are individual lines of flight from this plane.

Machine 11. Leeroy New's title is apt for his work: "Chimaera." Like the mythical beast, New's fiberglass and polyurethane sculpture is a patchwork of varying images of Amorsolo('s), portraying the master painter himself as creature of lore, both an actual body and an embodied collection of tales—a cultural fiction. And when these images come together, what is produced is an alien figure with black tattooed skin, cartoonish with its wide eyes and pink hair: manga meets bubblegum punk, a disturbing mishmash of elements so thoroughly distorted that one can no longer look at this as mere distortion. Instead, it is Amorsolo recontextualized, reinvigorated for an audience that constantly yet unconsciously juxtaposes classical realism with Nickelodeon.

Eleven artists work together to rediscover a machine each of them hardly knows, admittedly. But they end up doing more than simply rediscovering: they reconstruct him, each creating his/her own Amorsolo towards an ever-growing set of Amores Muchos. This is an invitation extended to every Filipino—that we look again this August at Amorsolo's works. Not to celebrate his genius by simply remembering him—his genius is irrelevant here—but by constructing him over and over again.

To each his own Amor Solo.