Vault, no. 48, 2024.
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These days everything is sculpture, so every young artist can consider themself a sculptor. And yet, few think sculpturally, spatially—that’d be formalism, old school. Paradoxically, this makes Miguel Aquilizan a breath of fresh air. His creative adventure is palpable in his works themselves, not resting unduly on supplementary wall texts for explanation. His assemblages crackle with mixed messages and intrigues.

Aquilizan is not programmatic. He’s intuitive, improvisational, inventive. Everything comes out of making, out of play in the studio. ‘I use my hands to think, and not my brain’, he says. Aquilizan makes art from anything to hand, grafting made and found: likely and unlikely; the raw and the cooked; metal and timber; plaster, resin, and expanding foam; plastic flowers and a dead tree; furniture and ornaments.

While many of his works have an authoritative scale, they’re also ramshackle and provisional. He prefers the charm of bricolage—that stitched-together Frankenstein’s-monster look—foregrounding the process. However, for all their feral energy and punky attitude, his works echo strategies familiar from the art-history playbook: classical, modern, ‘primitive’; busts on plinths, fragments of figures. Like Brancusi, he fashions elaborate bases, exploring the play between object and plinth. 

Art runs in the family. Aquilizan was born in Manila in the Philippines in 1986 and emigrated to Brisbane with his family in 2006. These days, he splits his time between here and there. His parents are the longstanding international art duo Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, famous for their assemblage sculptures addressing precarity and displacement, migration and home. Miguel Aquilizan went to art school in the Philippines, and, like his siblings, works on his parents’ projects. ‘My parents give us freedom and let us play. They use art as an excuse to spend time together’, he explains.

But Aquilizan’s solo practice is different. While his parents’ work is noble, hopeful, and humanistic, his is more unruly, dark, and fashionable. He may work intuitively, but his intuitions are hardly random. They express him, creating a distinctive universe. His surreal mash-ups have a magical quality, with one foot in totemism and animism, the other in science-fiction and the post-human. ‘I like the idea of obscuring and mutating what is familiar, making everything alien’, he observes.

Aquilizan’s exhibit in Platform—the new-artist show at the Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, earlier this year—was like stepping into a movie set, into some art director’s idea of a sculpture exhibition. It featured eight works, which looked like they could have been made by artists from different places, times, cultures. Despite the diversity, a funereal quality pervaded the ensemble. Amongst the sculptures, Aquilizan interspersed toxic-looking fake plants anchored in lumps of plaster—titled Mutagenesis. Fleurs du mal.

The Platform sculptures were riddled with references to the human body. Like us, Venustasis stood on two legs, which supported a full-length mirror, in which we could see our good selves reflected. The mirror prompted us to orient ourselves to it as the ‘face’ of the sculpture, filling its body with our own. In the centre of the mirror, a piece of fake fruit—split open to suggest a cyclopean eye, a vagina, or both—reversed our gaze while superimposed on our reflection. 

Venustasis may have been bodily, but everything was out of wack. The legs were in the right place, but, where the head should be, there was an arm shape, like a fragment of classical sculpture. Here and there, globes adhered to it, while other parts seemed to have rotted away, leaving cavities encrusted with glittery costume jewels. 

At the heart of the show, Post-Vitruvius responded to Leonardo’s iconic drawing Vitruvian Man, that cliché of ‘Western civilisation’, from half a millennium ago. It depicts a naked man in two superimposed positions within a circle and square, as proof of his ideal nature. We instinctively read the figure as having two arms, two legs—but in different moments. However, it could be misread as a mutant, with limbs proliferating, like some Hindu deity, exceeding human limitations. Aquilizan mobilised the ambiguity, mimicking Leonardo’s figure by combining two life-size plastic-reproduction generic human skeletons to imagine a star-jumping single skeleton with four outstretched legs and four extended arms, repurposing the spare spine as an alien/reptilian tail.

For cultish veneration, the hybrid skeleton was raised on a pedestal made from an upturned chair and an art deco occasional table. The pedestal housed a wooden carving of a poised snake gripping a giant egg, this kitschy objet d’art acquiring a genuine menace in its new context. It looked symbolic, but who knew what it symbolised? The skeleton was studded with several small coloured blocks, suggesting chakras, energy nodes, or similar. A metal halo implied it had transcended death, achieved grace. Should we read Post-Vitruvius as a primordial form of man (we once had tails) or a glimpse of a glorious mutant future? Was it a warning (to not to imagine ourselves divine) or a throwaway joke (a touch of ghost-train gothic)?

For Sentinel, cubisty plywood constructions—with cheap wooden bowls attached like radio dishes—were gathered on a modernist glass coffee table, suggesting a low-tech representation of high-tech cell towers or similar. I was reminded of the Papua New Guinea cargo cult seen in the 1962 documentary Mondo Cane. Suddenly exposed to new technology, they created—in bamboo—a religious shrine in the form of an airplane.

While Aquilizan’s works can touch on grand themes, they’re mediated through his permissive mix-and-match fashion sensibility. (This makes sense when you encounter Aquilizan—in his Rick Owens pants and platforms, with his distinctive hairdos and stunning tattoos.) I’m reminded of Jean Paul Gaultier in the 1990s, colliding cultural frames and citations for the sake of creating a cool look. I suspect that, for Aquilizan, cultural copyright and authenticity aren’t pressing concerns, and everything is fair game for appropriation and play. He has much in common with sculptors like David Altmejd, Huma Bhabha, and Francis Upritchard.

That said, there is one clear dimension of cultural specificity. Aquilizan relates his love of found materials and his recycling approach to his homeland, with its culture of poverty and precarity. In the Philippines, he says, things are never thrown away, but endlessly repurposed and reanimated. Aquilizan supports his practice by foraging for materials—he’s a magpie, an op-shopper, and has been working as a deceased-estate cleaner. When his shows come down, he doesn’t store his works for posterity, but returns them to the studio, to cannibalise them to make new works for new shows. 

Aquilizan’s work is in a constant state of recycling and reiteration, never standing still. In the last week of Platform, he worked with workshop participants to cover his sculpture Prospero with fake flowers. It was as if the menacing, faceless, rocky wraith had spontaneously bloomed, transforming hollow man into flower child. For me, it recalled Hugh Jackman fatally overcome by floral abundance after drinking sap from the Tree of Life in The Fountain (2006) and Florence Pugh encased in flowers at the end of Midsommar (2019). 

Aquilizan’s works wear their speculations lightly. If his work is about or for anything, it’s metamorphosis—the spirit of creating and evolving, of ferment and flux. At a time when art school preps young artists to overthink and overexplain, Aquilizan ringfences a space for play.

[IMAGE: Miguel Aquilizan in Platform, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2024.]