Iya C

THE EYES HAVE IT
Artist Iya Consorio mounts a 10-painting exhibit that stares at you with a hundred different eyes.

By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman

If the eyes were the windows to the soul, contemporary artist Iya Consorio would be soulful—because her paintings often feature repetitive images of the eyes. “I love putting eyes into my paintings because if I were the subject, I’d want to have more than one pair of eyes because if you had many eyes, you wouldn’t know where, whom, or what to look for. And I like that. You see a lot of images that make you dizzy and confused and it will get you thinking, ‘Where should I look? Is the image I am looking at the image I should be looking for?’”

Iya likes dark, sad, punk, and emotional subjects. And so, in her latest contemporary exhibit called “Weird Machines,” surrealism, eyes, and monochrome palette ruled. Her paintings were inspired by the dark versions of fairytales Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, stories she used to read as a kid. “My latest exhibit is about misery, and despair, and darkness.

“Fate’s a bitter lady/ Beat us to a pulp/ I am sure she means well/ She’s just a little dull/ To have stayed alive intertwined between punch and dream.” So goes the band Small Black’s “Weird Machines,” from which the title of the exhibition was drawn. The song, according to Iya, represented her works in the show.
“I love being sad. It comforts me. And my art is my way of releasing my emotions, even when I am swimming in misery. I am more inspired when I am sad. I don’t like perky, upbeat paintings. I find them corny,” she says, smiling.

But Iya isn’t depressed. Perhaps, she prefers her world dark and soulful. “I want to hold on to the people and things that matter to me. When you already have your ideal life—pursuing a career that you love and having a happy family—fear starts to creep in. You start to ask, when will the darkness start? You start to be anxious and you become paranoid,” she says. It isn’t surprising that among her 10-painting exhibit, her favorite is The Agoraphobia, a painting of an anxious woman with 15 eyes. What is she looking for and looking at? What makes her uneasy?

If inspiration and influences are what Iya is looking for, she says she gets them from pop and surrealist artists like Keichi Tanaami, Louie Cordero, and Jojo Legaspi. But her favorite is her husband artist Andres Barrioquinto, who’s also into surrealism and Japanese prints. “I find it overwhelming that I get to marry my idol. I have the tendency to be submissive because he is my mentor. Yes, he influences me but he allows me to also grow as an artist, independent of him,” she says.

With all the eyes in her paintings, what exactly is Iya looking for? She doesn’t know. To find out, we can just look straight into her eyes. The eyes, after all, always have it.