“Sonny Fernando: Under House ARTrest” is a solo exhibition by Sonny Fernando that is exhibited from October 06– 31, 2022 at the NCCA Gallery. “If you would like to know how it feels to be in hospitality during the corona-virus pandemic…Remember when the Titanic was sinking and the band continued to play?… Well, we’re the band.”  When the dreaded Covid-19 emerged and descended upon the world in 2020, humanity found itself in a dark place. So dark and dim as if the Grim Reaper had decided to set up camp at our very doorstep. Despite the enforced lockdown, despite the social isolation, the insidious virus, with cunning and stealth, succeeded to infiltrate our private spaces and claim the lives of our loved ones.  And like the band that played on while the Titanic was sinking, Sonny Fernando, an artist based in Tarlac, continued to paint while the pandemic raged relentlessly, and, together with his wife Grace, secluded himself at home. Though the Filipino artist may be in solitary confinement, he is not without defense. He knows that art is the best vaccine for the ailing soul.  While the pandemic scourge has plunged most everyone into deepest introspection about mortality, the meaning of existence, and the helplessness of life against an invisible enemy – the more emotionally fragile succumbing to depression and misery – Sonny Fernando, by dint of natural temperament, looked at the interminable lockdown with a different perspective. Sonny reminds us of the words of the Irish and playwright Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”  Thus, by choosing to perceive the quarantine not as a toxic experience, but as a real tonic – meaning invigorating, rejuvenating, reviving – a time when he can devote all his hours to his art – Sonny emerged from his studio with more than enough works for a solo exhibition. In October 2022, he will present all these works in a show, aptly titled: “Sonny Fernando: Under House Art-rest.”  A 1977 graduate of architecture at the University of Santo Tomas, Sonny immediately worked for his father who had a construction company.

In 1980, he joined a design company, MGL Designs, where he honed his design prowess.  After the Edsa People Power Revolution in 1986, the partners emigrated to either the US or Canada, leaving Sonny on his own. Now with a permit from the Philippine Regulation Committee (PRC), Sonny set up a design shop that bannered his name, putting up a furniture workshop in Quezon City. A total, all-around designer, he did murals and stage designs for concerts and beauty pageants. Sonny recalls applying designs with textile paint on five dresses brought by Cory Aquino, not yet the president, but a kabalen from Tarlac, when she visited Ninoy Aquino in Boston, USA. 

After seven years, Sonny responded to an advertisement for an interior designer needed in Saudi Arabia. Despite being the last one to submit an application, he got the post. 

It was only in 2013 when, back in Manila, Sonny took up painting seriously. Previously, however, he had joined exhibitions in Manila., such as the one held at the Elks Club. He still remembers that he sold a painting for P400. In 1982, Sonny managed to have a solo show at the Hyatt Hotel Art Gallery, where he thrilled to a sale of 12 works. After that, due to his many design assignments, his art was kept simmering on the back burner. 

Through a high schoolmate from Don Bosco, Noli Romero, who owned Renaissance Art Gallery, Sonny was able to have a solo show in Manila in 2014. This writer, meeting the artist for the first time, wrote: 

“Indeed, in Fernando’s works, the trace of the hand seems to have been banished from view. His works are streamlined, sharply geometric, seemingly machine-tooled, studiously calculated and measured, nothing improvisatory, with no allowances for accidents, mistakes, and, one might say, surgically and cleanly executed with all the instruments at the command of an architect or an engineer. Precision is paramount. In Fernando’s creative dictum, sloppiness is anathema.” 

In his forthcoming NCCA show, Sonny will be exhibiting selected works from a body of paintings all done during the long pandemic lockdown. They bear all the trademarks of his earlier works, reiterating his highly systematic creative process, now reified into representational images: provincial gardens, a barber shop, a sabongero, or cockfight aficionado. 

Simply told: they are a marvel to behold, a labor of love that documents in his uniquely geometric style the many themes and images that preoccupied him, all impelled, interestingly enough by some philosophical musing, triggered by a specific subject. This is indicative of Sonny Fernando as an artist: he seizes upon an image only when it can stimulate him intellectually, offering something to the mind and not just being eye candy.

A regular traveler to the US with his wife Grace, to visit their grown-up children and their grandchildren, Sonny keeps an observant eye on all the goings-on. For instance, he has observed a radical change in the lifestyle of people coming from a diversity of races and gender, in particular. As reflected in his works, it is indistinguishable whether the figure is a man or a woman. Though he works in a stylized geometric style, Sonny vanishes all traces of gender identification. To be sure, the figures are not specifically Filipino: they could belong to the brown, black or yellow race. Indeed, he likens America to a bowl of salad: a medley of various greens, nuts, cheeses, and croutons. The dressing is democracy: its all-embracing openness to a merry mix of races, genders, and lifestyles. 

Lovers in an embrace in the park, or a couple walking a pet dog – a scene Sonny frequently sees – may be both men or both women, or the conventional man and woman. Thus, the figures in his work depicting Adam and Eve and the Forbidden Apple might as well be Adam and Yves. 

(Talk of forbidden: Sonny has dared depict a scene that is bound to offend polite society, at least in our own country: the rude, startling image of a man excreting, seated on a toilet bowl. Still “decent” by Western standards, in America, this is called “Poop Art”.) 

Sonny Fernando’s style, which is mainly driven by the engine of geometry, impresses Americans as a kind of quilt, a multi-layered textile kept in place by lines of stitching.  His works are all laboriously and punctiliously hand-painted. The artist achieves this quilt-like design through the ingenious device of cut stencils, which are applied and re-applied all over the pictorial space, giving the impression of fractals: “a series of patterns repeated over and over again, at many different scales.” With immediacy, these fractals summon the visual pleasures of an animated surface saturated with abstractive images. 

The show “Sonny Fernando: Under House Art-rest” is a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit, refusing to be cowed by the curse of the Covid-19 pandemic. And yes – let it be said – this is an arresting show!