Jucar Raquepo’s satirical oil paintings feature packed compositions of cartoon dogs playing poker, Van Gogh with a crown, the iconic Batman crime boss, Two Face, and a very familiar outline surrounding all of these figures.

This shape is that of the jeepney, its windshield, its main entrance flanked by tiny windows, its mudguards. With all that’s going on in these paintings of Raquepo, the jeepney serves as a most fitting overall organizing shape, even as these very shapes morph into outlines of different monsters. The jeepney-like facade is made complete with the garish placard declarations atop it.

These paintings are the products of Raquepo’s fondness for what he calls our “aberrant” culture, born from our own very distinct interpretations of Spanish Catholicism, American consumerism, and western art.

This mutation of borrowed cultures is apparent in the hodge-podge rough-and-tumble of kitsch and references that become careful balancing acts with titles like Corruption, Validation, Divide and Conquer, and Fortune and Luck. These titles clue us into what each painting is about with its heavy composition of coded figures and symbols. On the whole, they are based on Raquepo’s observations on Filipino culture, politics, and even art. Their satirical intent would explain why a versatile painter and draughtsman like Raquepo who also creates lush realism would paint in the style of a political caricature.

Raquepo’s satirical tableaus are not the only highlight of Raquepo’s solo show with Vintana, “Cacophony of Forms, Freaks, and Oddities.” Rounding it all up are paintings in acrylic, compositions of various shapes filled up with flat colors, fragments of images, and impenetrable colorful noise.

Their overall abstraction is broken up by a prominent theme, images of circus freaks. With that, Raquepo announces an aberration of another kind and the mentality of an artist of this age. According to Raquepo, Contemporary Art, compared to Modern Art’s high and proper formalism and beauty, can be considered a freakshow. Its weirdness is the product of “helter-skelter overproduction and the regurgitation of things already done into strange forms.” In these paintings, both polarities, modernism’s formal intelligence of shapes and the inescapable irony and farce of the contemporary, serve as both the mother of invention and an unfeeling zombie-like drive to keep on making.

Click here to download the exhibit catalog.