SYNCRETISM MANIFESTO
SYNCRETISM embraces all denominations, factions, cliiques, trans-genders and breeders, the establishment, the heretics, the marginalized, the ostracized, the fat, the thin, Capitalists and Communists.
SYNCRETISM assimiilates Americanism, Europeanism, Chinafication, Japanization, Latinification, Filipinization, Art Brut, Naif, Dada, Fluxus, Subliminal Automatism Abstract, Pop, Anti-Art, Baroque and Grandma Art.
SYNCRETISM rejects dogmatism, fundamentalism, traditionalism, exclusivity.
SYNCRETISM denounce, repudiate, refuse, eliminate, discard charlatans posing as artists and art lovers who twist public opinion into believing that marketability equals artistic excellence. I honour them with my Annual Peck Pinyon Awards.
The SYNCRETIST debunks the singular, signature style as a means of mass production and easy product recall.
The SYNCRETIST cultivates multiple styles, multiple techniques, multi-media, multiple personalities and guises in order not to be pigeon-holed and trapped in little boxes to be rarefied, classified, commodified.
The SYNCRETIST aims for peace, understanding, and harmony in the world.
ROY VENERACION
SYNCRETISM is the term I use to describe my stylistic tendency of combining opposing principles in a single artwork. I developed my theories around the eastern “yin-yang” idea of finding “wholeness” through the acceptance of the dualities in all experience. My attempt to resolve the contradictions inherent in the exchange of influences between east and west and the impact of the information age upon cultures, as well as the need to find the visual equivalents to contemporary thought and experience, led to this synthesis.
SYNCRETIC ABSTRACTIONS: I was initially concerned with uniting the dichotomies in abstract art practice. The geometric and expressionistic polarities, representing reason and intuition symbolically, were reconciled in my work by means of a geometric divisionism that brimmed with impassioned markings, colors and textures, but raised some eyebrows in the art establishment. Many artists however, later adopted this approach. Eventually, the fusion of eastern and western soul and language developed as the thematic focus of my syncretic abstractions.
Taken a step further, syncretic abstractionism led to SYNCRETISM, a broad gesture of crossing over the borderline to the other side. Abstract art, hitherto understood as the twentieth century art form that has turned away from the idea of art as a mimicry of nature, is here, seemingly desecrated by figure painting. Figures culled from magazines or snap shots, or totally invented, (oftentimes rendered with photographic accuracy to emphasize its separateness), are arbitrarily superimposed over the abstract paintings like the handiwork of fastidious iconoclasts or graffiti vandals. I have breached the wall that separates mutually exclusive domains.
Moreover, psychoanalysis and dreamwork are employed to reveal the hidden meanings of images emergent from my unconscious – or the mind of the viewer, as impulses differing from any conscious intentions – evoking hypnogogic-hallucinative images in agreement with Eric Fromm’s theory of dreams as the “ ‘Forgotten Language’ that express both the wisdom and spirituality that transcends waking thought.” And reacting to the detached rationalism of much of recent art practice I bemoan the descent of a once revolutionary artform into effete, fawning, commercial decorative items. I seek a more ardent, piquant effervescence in art, and set to employ randomness, chance procedures, mixed techniques, fragmentation, the use of objet trouves, letting nature do it, occasionally using leaves, soil, sand, natural and industrial debris as alternative, if anarchic modes of expression. The purpose of art as a potent tool of political protest and social satire is never to be precluded.
It may be said that Syncretism is at its fullest when its contrasting elements become interdependent and cannot be the same without the interactive discontinuities, dissociations and connections.