Out of Print

Luis Lopa at a Crossroad in Three Acts

by Sai Versailles

Art and photos courtesy of Luis Lopa.

A writer sets out on a script about a painter at a crossroad, making sense of surfing, the banes of technology, and art's value in the world.

ACT I

Sitting by the windowsill of The Curator on C. Palanca Street. It’s a Wednesday. It rained the night before. How should I go about the interview?

I’ve fucked myself over with an impossible task. Write this profile like a script. The best stories are based on real-life, right? Well, this is as real as it gets.

Subject, Luis Lopa. Filipino, male. Born in Manila, majored in Visual Arts at the University of British Columbia. After seventeen years, he moved back to Manila in 2014. One botched attempt to return in 2012, but Luis couldn’t fully commit.

“His work explores the relationships between experience, memory, colour, and texture,” creating “systems of space and sensation” using “the familiar language of abstract painting,” according to luislopa.wordpress.com

But isn’t everything about relationships, experience, memory, colour, texture, space, sensation, and the familiar language of our abstractions? Why has this become the query of this man’s life? What has it got to do with mine? Jeez, what a loaded question.

I first met Luis during his artist residency in San Juan, La Union. I was there with friends – I don’t remember much – but an indelible image appears: An orange oval with a dollop of bright yellow smeared across it. My friend has a t-shirt of it. I think it was on a tote bag, too.

2 AM. We’re in a living room. Luis and Mateo squatted in front of a stack of surfboards. Mateo is the head chef of Scallywag R&D Club in San Juan’s The Great Northwest. They serve a mean chicken inasal, but he happens to be a talented surfer. Luis and Mateo talked about the rocker, or the curve on the nose and tail that gives a surfboard its shape. The more aggressive the rocker, the more maneuverability. Yet, the most incremental adjustments can radically change how a board rides on a wave. They’re surfboard shapers. Their hands wailed to the sound of their discourse.

That was in 2021, the last time Luis and I crossed paths. I don’t really know him.

And so, we come to the end of this monologue where WRITER must speak in this scene eloquently. So many junctures have led us to this point. We see LUIS enter through the café door, wearing a fluorescent yellow t-shirt and running shoes. A distant mumbling. How long has he been here? Where did he come from? …

LUIS
I was in Siargao, then I was in Baler two weeks ago.

WRITER
Oh, were you visiting Baler?

LUIS
Yeah, I was there for a bit. I used to live there.

WRITER
When?

LUIS
Before the pandemic. So, 2019. Four, five months. I used to go there a lot.

WRITER
But you live in Siargao?

LUIS
Yeah. Well, I moved to Siargao last July, until December. I've been here, for now. I still have some stuff there. I don't exactly know what I'm going to do yet. But that was the last place I was living in. Like, settled in.

WRITER
Is it OK if we start?

LUIS
Yeah, let's do it.

WRITER
So, tell me about Siargao. What’s it like living there?

LUIS
It's a whole different experience. I guess I’ll just start now, like, get it out of the way. But I think a lot of people don't understand that there are certain challenges with living there. Or maybe they do. I don't know. It's a bit rough. Even speaking to people that have lived there longer, they're like, yeah, it wears you down. In certain ways.

WRITER
In what way?

LUIS
It doesn’t have the conveniences of the city. You’re either on a bike or a motorcycle. That's a challenge for some. It doesn’t have the same creature comforts and small stuff adds up. Like, your plumbing doesn’t work, or you don’t have water or electricity one day. That’s not a negative thing. You’re not gonna die. More like, it wears you down if you’re used to living in the city …

January 1, 2020. A solo trip to Siargao Island. There’s a 349-meter bridge north of General Luna, the main town, to Cabitoonan. They just paved the road, but not enough to connect it to the other side. Next to the bridge was a causeway made of sand, soil, and gravel – a parallel construction site for heavy equipment. The causeways were connected by wooden planks and held by steel beams anchored to the seabed, joining General Luna and Cabitoonan.

The causeways were a temporary solution to a promise that was coming soon – the promise of infrastructure, for a more developed Siargao. There was a nipa hut on the edge of the bridge where construction workers rested after they threw in the towel. It had an eastern view of the ocean and the mangroves out west. The bridge was a meeting point for people of all sides of the island. They brought their longboards, Bluetooth speakers, and cases of beer. Kids jumped from the rails and into the water while onlookers on stand-up paddle boards peered from below.

When it was time to go home, I rode my motorcycle across the causeways. Just the moonlight and some flood lamps to light the way. The planks were wonky, especially when the waves were strong, but it got me to where I needed to be.

They named it Sunset Bridge. That was fun …

LUIS
Yeah, super fun.

WRITER
Did you feel that way when you got there? Like, ooh ... [Disgusted, skeptic]

LUIS
No. I mean, I was pretty cowboy with everything. So, it's chill.

WRITER
Why did you move there?

LUIS
A lot of different things. So, actually, the reason I chose to meet you here is because my old studio was just down the block. My friend was running a restaurant at the bottom floor. I was on the fifth floor. We kind of knew each other before, but that’s how we got closer. He’d hang out upstairs, right, and I’d go downstairs if I was bored. And when he was bored, he’d run up to the studio and have a drink or something. That was here, in this neighbourhood, for four years. It was really good and productive. But I just wanted to shake things up. At the same time, I was getting into surfboard shaping – like, making boards. Here, I was travelling to the studio, to La Union or Baler, and I was always compartmentalizing things. This is art and work, this is surfing. In Siargao, I wake up. I can see the beach, and I go. Surf. Make art. I wouldn’t say it was a no brainer, but it would’ve fit everything into one box.

WRITER
You used to live in Vancouver, right?

LUIS
Oh, yeah, I used to live in Vancouver. I moved there when I was nine years old.

[Beat]

Well, my parents did. I went with them. [Laughs]

WRITER
Was there a moment when you felt like you were grappling with your place here?

LUIS
[Chuckles] Yeah ...

[Beat]

Oh yeah. [With emphasis] It's weird, too. Because when you're there, you're not from Vancouver. And when you're here, you're not from here either! Fuck! [Laughs]

WRITER
How does it feel to not belong anywhere?

LUIS
It’s very subtle. It's not anything intentional or directly against you. There are just some things I can’t relate with, or some things people can’t relate with about me. There’s some nuance that …

[Beat]

yeah, you’re not from here.

WRITER
I’ve been reading a book called Revaluation 1997 by Bienvenido Lumbera. There’s a chapter explaining the shift from this colonial mentality of writing in English or Spanish, to writing from the “Filipino” perspective, which really just meant the Tagalog perspective. And it reminds me of this weird thing about the Filipino language where we never know which syntax to use. I have a friend from Ateneo Law School who I was talking to in Tagalog, but he kept asking, “Why are you speaking Tagalog?” Which is weird because when I was living in London, English people saw me as this Filipino writer writing about the Philippines. But I wasn’t even in the Philippines. It’s not like I was close to the source. But when I’d come back to Manila, I always hesitated to stay here too long.

LUIS
Yeah, those things. They’re small, not really bad, things. But you brought up an interesting point. When I got here, I didn’t think to create art from a Filipino perspective because it's not really my perspective.

WRITER
What's your perspective?

LUIS
I don't know? That's why. I was like, shit, this is getting weird. Because I'm living and working here. But I don't want to necessarily make the work from this perspective. So, I'm just going to do my own thing. But then, what's my own thing? Does that mean my work is Canadian? Does it exist as a different thing? I don't know. That just reminded me of thoughts I've had when I make art. Like, this isn't exactly from here, but it's not not from here either.

ACT II

There’s a beautiful painting in the Tate Modern I’ll never forget. Big red streaks on a huge nude canvas. It’s Untitled (Bacchus) by Cy Twombly, an American painter who spent most of his time in Italy and whose name sounds oddly like mine.

When I think about “abstract expressionism,” I think, at the first instance, of this painting. It stands roughly three meters in length and nearly five meters in width – about fifteen square meters. Despite being “Untitled,” Twombly left a few clues.

Bacchus was the Greek god of wine, so maybe he spilled his glass. While dancing. Maybe he was drunk. The Greeks were hedonists, right? The red looks a lot like blood. Why is the canvas colored nude? Is the canvas naked? Was Cy Twombly?

Yet, a little Google search will tell you Twombly distanced himself from abstract expressionism when he moved to Rome in 1957. He studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which he attended with Robert Rauschenberg. He lived and worked at a time when abstract expressionism was just making sense in New York City, where the movement began. Then in Rome, he ditched the random scribbles to reference more direct motifs. He lived through films like La Dolce Vita, Suspiria, and Cannibal Holocaust, eating carbonara with guanciale instead of ham. He lived in Rome until he died in 2011, aged eighty-one. He painted Untitled (Bacchus) in 2008.

Art critics will tell you Twombly wasn’t an abstract expressionist. But does the expressionism end with the artist, critic, or viewer? What if we redacted information, as so much already is? We’d see no museum label, yet we know to put the words “abstract” and “expressionism” together. That means to say something abstractly, right? In convoluted terms? In any way I want?

It’s impossible to unknow what you already know.

LUIS
It's intuitive, but there's a logic to it.

WRITER
So, what's the logic? [Distracted, surprised]

EDITOR of Out of Print enters the café, wearing a suit and a K95 mask.

EDITOR
Oh my god, it’s happening!

WRITER
[Squealing] Oh my god, hi!

EDITOR skedaddles to the cashier and grabs a coffee. He disappears behind the curtain.

LUIS
What’s the logic? That’s something I'm trying to figure out. There’s a certain lineage in painting where they discovered this in the 1400s, and that in the 1800s, and this in the 2000s. Abstract expressionism was one of the last bigger things, I guess, that happened in the last hundred years and, at that point, you either branched off from it or went completely astray. Before abstract expressionism, people were like, a tree is a tree. Whatever the painting was was what they were trying to represent. Then a bunch of things changed in a hundred years for a bunch of different reasons. Jackson Pollock wanted to record actions with action painting. Then Picasso was painting dimensions that weren’t there – like, spaces between objects. Then there’s abstract expressionism which is more about just painting and not some external source.

[Beat]

But I’m trying to break down what physical thinking means now. Because why are we even doing this? I could make a nice painting, it’s not that hard. But people are like, why? So, the way I’ve thought about this logic of painting is to break it down to something simple. You might have seen some of my works on Instagram where it’s these rectangles. That’s part of this logic of painting that I plan to build up, which boils down to decision making. Like, this is one rectangle and it’s yellow. This one rectangle is green. This one’s black. And I sequence them together and somehow that means something to you, just by three decisions. That’s where I derive breaking down paintings into colours and textures, into decisions, and receiving that as information. It becomes its own tree in a sentence, right? Or when you play an instrument, like a string of three notes, and that somehow means a sad song or a song about a bird.

WRITER
It's interesting you use words like “sequence” and “information” and I wonder what your relationship is with technology. Are you the type of person to detach from it?

LUIS
Yeah, a lot. Going on these surf trips or living in Siargao, you’re pretty detached even if you do have internet and all that. It’s not the same. Like, straight up, the download speeds are slower. In that way, it’s great because you’re not bombarded with so much. But at the same time, a lot of this work does address technology and, in that way …

[Beat]

Aw, man. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. There’s the physical realm, right, which we exist in. And – I don’t know if you’re religious or not – but there’s also the spiritual—that has to exist, right? Like when you die, whatever. And I think, in the past forty or fifty years, we’ve introduced this digital realm. That’s a whole other thing. We made it. So, we got to think about that too.

WRITER
What does a painting look like in the digital realm?

LUIS
I don't know, but the digital realm is where we sequence information. When you think about ones and zeros, like JPEGs, Bitcoins, programs, or even phones, you’re just sequencing info – placing materials together that creates the thing. I don't exactly know how this relates to painting or if painting is even relevant enough to discuss that.

WRITER
I was on YouTube recently where a guy asked about the role of consciousness in the world of blockchain. This Yogi guru was like, oh, if there was another world for us to go to, we’d be there by now. When in fact, there’s only one world where you and I are having this conversation. And if you think whatever is in your mind is reality, and you take your thoughts too seriously, that’s more of a hallucination than reality. Everything else is just imagination.

LUIS
I relate to that. When I think about painting too much, it's not the real world anymore. Then I’m like, what am I doing? You can exist in the crazy academic art bubble and feed into that loop. But being in that storm in Siargao made me think, OK, painting doesn’t really matter too much. [Laughs] You’re there, and you’re on survival mode.

WRITER
What happened during the storm?

LUIS
Everything was wrecked, which is why I’m here. I’m figuring it out. It’s only getting back to normal now. But people who stayed experienced it longer than I did. It’s the same thing where it's like, you can't go too deep into your thoughts, right? Whether that's painting or whatever else you're doing. Then, what should art be about now?

ACT III

Outside my balcony, the rain has turned the river into sordid colors. On heavy days, Pasig River is between black and dark moss. I wouldn’t say it’s “green” because there’s a luminance to green you don’t find in a biologically dead river.

But when the sun shines just right, you forget about all that.

You forget about the wailing, the honking, and the heckling. You forget about the stray dogs outside and how their barks echo as if to call us, “Help! Help!” You forget about the gravel between your toes, or the puddle water in your sandals. You forget about your dirty laundry, your broken stove, the long waiting times.

Because when a boat passes, the water zips, peels, and feathers into endlessly undulating waves. At golden hour, the orbiting waves can be hard to distinguish from the aquatic plants swaying underwater.

This somehow reminds me of Salvacion in Siargao, a right-handed pointbreak close to an islet that protects the shoulder-high waves from eastern winds. My friend and I used our leg rope to attach our boards on the side rack of our motorcycles, then drove offroad across Cabitoonan, Libertad, and Santa Fe. It drizzled on the way.

We reached the port and took a boat out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t care how vast the water was, or how an eight-foot wave meant the water was ten feet deep. I didn’t mind that my friend was a better surfer than me, or how the current was so strong I was paddling in one place. When the waves crashed above me, the coral reef was over my head and the water’s surface beneath my feet.

I forgot about it all. I was lost in the sauce, lost in the sauce…

LUIS
Each spot brings a different type of surfer too, right? In Siargao, a lot of guys who are just so gnarly …

WRITER
I died in Salvacion.

LUIS
I died there too, many times.

WRITER
It was a milestone in my surfing. Because when you get caught by waves in the middle of paddling, it's like you’re in a washing machine.

LUIS
It's big. You get stuck in that weird corner. It's in the middle of the ocean, so you can't go back. One time, I told myself I'm just not going to move …

WRITER
Just take me!

LUIS
I try to paddle then by the third or fourth one, I don't have it in me anymore. I'm just gonna let it hit me and hopefully I get pushed to the boat.

WRITER
So, when did you start shaping surfboards?

LUIS
2017. I’ve only made under ten. But it's a long process of making, testing, and learning what these different contours do. It’s so subtle. Most of it is just four or five different numbers and that makes the board. You can only do so much with this piece of foam. It’s not like you can put an engine. And that makes it pretty cool.

WRITER
Does sport inform the way you live as an artist?

LUIS
That's a really good question. For me, I always relate it to the practice, like how a basketball player trains. They wake up and train for ten hours a day. I really like that idea. I definitely appreciate the discipline of top athletes, and, for a long time, I carried that mentality over by getting in the studio at a certain time, putting in the work, and having that regimen. I also think sports allow you to decompress or cycle through ideas. If not, just the chemical reaction of endorphins helps you think better.

WRITER
Do you have a favourite surf spot in Siargao?

LUIS
Salvacion is one of them. On a good day.

WRITER
Stimpy's is good.

LUIS
Rock Island, too. But I feel like Salvacion is one my favorite spots there. It’s a super long ride, but it does get pretty crazy. Access to places like this is so invaluable. Why, though!

WRITER
I mean, to make an artistic practice viable, let's be real. You have to be close to the city.

LUIS
You do. If you’re an artist, you can’t create in a vacuum.

WRITER
Have your methods changed since moving to Siargao? Or new subject matters occupying your mind right now?

LUIS
Most artists have certain thought processes and ways of working and it's just up to them to input, receive, and plug it into their life. That needs to be maintained, but you need to learn other ways to do things too, right? There are limitations that make you work differently. Even the lighting of a place can make me paint differently or mix one colour four shades lighter than if I was here …

[Beat]

But we've come to this spot now which isn’t exactly a stalemate. Maybe I have to reframe something, to step into a different direction, or shake things up a bit. I mean, there's definitely things I'm interested in and paths I could go. But none of them are like, “Yo, this is what you should do right now.” Versus if you asked me this three years ago, I was locked in. You can't bother me. I won't even go out on a Friday night. That's the weird, strange thing that I think a lot of artists go through.

WRITER
You’ve been an artist for ten years, as well.

LUIS
Ten years, yeah. I’m not necessarily a master, but I know a few things here and there, right? And now I’m at this point where I have to reevaluate where to put this energy, versus going down a path that maybe doesn't feel right anymore. This pulling back, hitting the breaks, and taking a look is the super tricky part about being creative because that straddles complacency. There’s a really fine line between reflection and being fucking busy.

WRITER
You’re someone who does a lot and is interested in so many things. Is that a vice or a virtue?

LUIS
A little bit of both. The paintings wouldn't be as interesting if I didn't surf, and I wouldn't have this view of making surfboards if I wasn't a painter. One thing I will say though is that a lot of the things I’m interested in are related to each other. Painting is a hands-on thing, so is shaping boards. The interests I’ve picked are the things my person is better at doing. That’s what I mean when I say if all this could fit as one thing. So, instead of being a jack of all trades, how can you move your different interests, passions, and occupations? Like, Virgil Abloh isn’t really a clothing designer or a painter. No, he’s that guy who does that stuff. I don’t think it has to be so compartmentalized. You can be one person in different fields and your work is valued by the good decisions you make in those fields …

[Beat]

I can also see another way this unfolds where I work quietly in a workshop, and no one bothers me. I die, and that’s the work I do. ︎

Sai Versailles is a multimedia journalist based in Manila, Philippines.