‘System Corrupted’ at Finale Art File
By Carlos Quijon, Jr.

Charlie Co in his studio. Photo by E.S.L. Chen. Image courtesy of the artist.

Charlie Co’s career spans a prolific painterly practice, pioneering collective work as a member of Black Artists in Asia, founded in 1986 with Norberto Roldan and Nunelucio Alvarado and others, and the group’s work on establishing the landmark exhibition and conference series Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon) that started in 1990, which will have its 2023 edition in Antique, convening practitioners from the Visayas islands. Aside from these, he co-founded the artist space Gallery Orange in Bacolod in 2005, with entrepreneur Victor Benjamin Lopue. A platform for mentoring and working with young artists based in Bacolod, Gallery Orange transformed into Orange Project and moved to a two-story space in 2018. Aside from exhibitions, Orange Project also hosts a residency programme and most recently, alongside the exhibition of Co in Finale Art File, has been participating in the annual Art Fair Philippines.

Charlie Co, ‘System Corrupted’, exhibition view. Image courtesy of the artist and Finale Art File.

Sheer scale and chromatic intensity characterise Charlie Co’s most recent works for ‘System Corrupted’, an exhibition at Finale Art File that marks the artist’s 40 years of practice. Ferocious reds and electric blues recur across larger than life canvases where religious iconography dwells with scenes of destruction and where throngs of people and rabid creatures swarm. The paintings draw their viewers in in the immensity of these compositions. Alongside these colored canvases are smaller black and white charcoal on paper drawings that allow us glimpses of intimate moments – perhaps air starting to clear or a barrage of introspective thoughts or solitary sojourns.

Charlie Co, ‘World Gone Mad’, 2021, acrylic on modeling paste on canvas, 244 x 610cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Finale Art File.

Immensity in Co’s work is sometimes a dizzying disfiguration as in ‘World Gone Mad’ (2021), a 610cm acrylic on canvas painting. A menagerie of faces, heads, limbs, crazed eyes are crammed in the canvas creating a topsy-turvy composition. Robotic dogs guard the painting’s perimeter. Upon closer inspection, we see vignettes: silhouettes of people in various states of distress, airborne viruses, carrozas with icons of saints. Speaking about the work, Co referred to the uncertainty people faced during the pandemic. This has been translated into the confusion of figures that crowd the work – a visual and affective congestion, where relief comes only from attending to the intimate pockets of recognisable scenes.

Co describes the works for this exhibition as “brutal,” “noisy,” brimming with “violence” but always sustained by “energy”. This is a vitality that he attributes to a clear recognition of mortality and finitude, particularly with the ongoing pandemic and as a person who has been living with diabetes for the past 40 years and received a kidney transplant in 2014. Co says, “The mortality is there. The urgency has always been there. Injecting insulin four times a day for forty years, I am reminded that I am fragile. But I have been able to sustain… as an artist you will be challenged by time, mentally, emotionally, physically.” This vitality, in turn, ensures each immense world that the works depict is an experience that is enlivened and evocative, and not a dry allegory of contemporary matters imposing its correspondences and “meaning” onto onlookers. It is the delicate distinction between immensity and imposition that the works of Co successfully treads. The scale of the works does not overcome the viewer into passivity or disorientation but instead coaxes them into focusing on the intricate vignettes or interesting materiality.

“It is the delicate distinction between immensity and imposition that the works of Co successfully treads. The scale of the works does not overcome the viewer into passivity or disorientation but instead coaxes them into focusing on the intricate vignettes or interesting materiality.”

Charlie Co, ‘Reflecting De Bruyckere’, 2019, acrylic on modeling paste on canvas, 305 x 244cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Finale Art File.

An installation by Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere which Co saw in Adelaide is the inspiration for the 305cm acrylic on modeling paste on canvas work ‘Reflecting De Bruyckere’ (2021), one of the earliest works in the exhibition. Titled ‘We are all flesh’ (2011-2), the installation is composed of a headless horse made from the actual animal’s skin and epoxy and hung from an iron gallow. The work spoke to Co’s ruminations on the limits of the human body, all flesh, in all its vulnerability. The ekphrastic exercise resulted in ‘Reflecting De Bruyckere’ (2021) where the artist resituates the beheaded horse on a chopping block against a vista of raging flames. Where de Bruyckere’s streamlined installation renders the sight of a dead animal into a clinical mise-en-scene, Co evokes a dreadful frenzy of flames razing the entire landscape. The chopping block becomes a platform for the dead animal. Inside its emptied body cavity is a corpse of a man–exposed genitalia and ribs jutting out its emaciated frame. Discussing his process for the series of the works, Co relates his technique of applying acrylic and modeling paste vigorously onto the canvas, almost as if clawing his way out of the empty canvas into the thick smoke, textures of flame and ash, finding oneself in medias res of decimation. The marks of the artist's hand leap off from the canvas as fiery red embers, as the horizon suffocates in dense smog.

Charlie Co, ‘Santo Entiero - Fame’, 2019, acrylic on modeling paste on canvas, 244 x 305cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Finale Art File.

This technique involving acrylic and modeling paste produces thick impastos that exhibit the paint’s sheen. The viscosity of the material allows it to take on the artist’s dynamic gestures and brings to the works vivid figuration. ‘Santo Entiero-Fame’ (2019) references the icon of Christ lying supine on his deathbed. For this work, we see a similar figure: bald, gaunt, and wide awake, ferried across the canvas by a swarm of people. Hands grip the figure’s limbs. The people’s faces and hands are red, expressions anguished, cramped in this human sea where a few seem to be swimming back up to the surface for air. One of them is about to take a bite out of the Christ figure’s hand. Some men in suits, backs to the viewers, prevent the sea of people from overflowing into the edges of the canvas. In the bottom right corner of the work, however, we see that their line breaks and the men, shrieking, assume the crazed façades of the swarm. Above them are dark clouds mutating into maniacal horses, running amok, and dropping what looks like asteroids into the crowd. We see how effective the gestures are in evoking the feverish catastrophic worlds of Co. The marks make sensible an erratic and distraught sensation, a vision made volatile by ruin and destruction.

Charlie Co, ‘Do We Have a Choice?’ 2023, acrylic on modeling paste on canvas, 244 x 305cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Finale Art File.

These motifs: flames burning the world to the ground, a maniacal horse, the iconography of Christ (this time, on the cross), consolidated in the work ‘Do We Have a Choice?’ (2023) are part of the more recent works in the exhibition. Flanked by figures on the cross – to the left a man, to the right a masked or perhaps a human-animal hybrid–a man riding a horse and bearing a match stick arrives at a burning field. One end of the match is lit, bearing a human face in agony. The other end is untouched. Unrecognisable faces and figures surface in the blaze behind the man. Below him, scorched sticks that resemble arms reaching out for succor. ‘Do We Have a Choice?’ (2023) rounds out the allegorical aspect of the exhibition. Gigantic matchsticks float in the gallery’s ceiling alluding to the conflagrations depicted in the paintings. Ensconced in one of their unlit tips is a globe, a gesture that for the artist completes the dramaturgy of the impending apocalypse.

In these works, catastrophe is vivid and in its vividness confronts the viewer of its imminence. However, Co’s visions of “systems corrupted” is not without its rescue. The artist’s hand literally materialises a compulsion to shape (both to create and to change) these narratives. Be it swirls of cloud or hair, lineaments of face, or waves of heat gently rising or billows of heavy smoke obscuring the horizon, Co’s gestural technique has successfully portrayed the presence not only of the artist but also of the images he has created. Anger fills the air of these compositions, as does frenzy and brute force. The images are never inert. Imbued with a vitality that saves its viewers from spectatorship, the images demand attentive labor: immersive in its scale, impassioned in its colouration, vigorous in its techniques and attempts to recast contemporary conditions into revelatory catastrophes.

‘System Corrupted’, a solo exhibition by Charlie Co runs from 10 February to 2 March 2023 at Finale Art File. More information here.

About the Writer

Carlos Quijon, Jr. is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Manila. He was a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), convened by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories project. His essays are part of the books SEA: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia (2022), Writing Presently (2019), and From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making: China and Southeast Asia (2019).