EP86: Ernest Concepcion & All His Transformations | Chabet, UP Fine Arts, Surreal, 13 Artists Award

When Paul Klee famously defined a line as “taking a dot for a walk,” the Swiss master could scarcely have imagined the terrifying and exhilarating journey that line would undertake in the hands of Ernest Concepcion. For Concepcion, the line is not merely a formal exercise, nor an innocent trajectory drifting across paper. Since the age of eight, he has driven that line into the darkest caverns of human consciousness, into landscapes charged with anxiety, violence, absurdity, and survival. What begins as a child’s playful gesture mutates, in his hands, into a weapon, a wound, a scream. The line becomes a noose tightening around the frailties and hypocrisies of society itself. Drawing, after all, is among the most familiar acts of childhood. Nearly every child picks up a pencil and dreams across a blank surface. But for Concepcion, drawing was never a passing amusement. It became destiny. The compulsive energy of mark-making seized him early and never relinquished its grip. From the beginning, his imagination burned with feverish intensity, transforming simple doodles into unsettling visions that exposed the grotesque theater of contemporary existence. In his art, fantasy and nightmare intertwine; humor collides with brutality; chaos erupts with startling beauty. Admittedly, Concepcion has long remained outside the glare of recognition enjoyed by many of his contemporaries from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, particularly those shaped under the towering influence of Roberto Chabet. Fate, however, had drawn him elsewhere. The years he spent in the United States after emigrating with his family distanced him physically from the Philippine art scene, rendering him something of an outsider to the narratives that canonized his generation. Yet exile became its own crucible. What might have diminished another artist instead hardened Concepcion’s vision, sharpening it with the raw instincts of survival. Just like other Filipino artists thrust at an early age into an alien culture, Concepcion learned to navigate unfamiliar terrain through wit, audacity, and intuition. He survived not through comfort, but through vigilance. The immigrant condition demanded improvisation — a constant readiness to confront instability, prejudice, displacement, and cultural fracture. These experiences became embedded in the DNA of his art. His imagery bristles with tension, as though every figure were caught in combat, every gesture poised between attack and collapse. Indeed, warfare — both literal and psychological — stands at the heart of Concepcion’s artistic universe. Battle is not merely a theme for him; it is a condition of existence. His works erupt like war zones of the subconscious, populated by monstrous hybrids, collapsing bodies, and hallucinatory spectacles that mirror the violence and absurdity of the modern world. Yet beneath the turbulence lies extraordinary control. Concepcion orchestrates chaos with the precision of a master tactician, transforming disorder into riveting visual symphonies. But his sharpest weapon is his childlike glee, nurtured by the companionship of comics, sci-fi stories, and video games in childhood. Now, in a striking turn of fate, Concepcion has returned to the very institution that once nurtured his intellect and imagination. As a teacher at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, he embodies the full arc of artistic return — the prodigal artist coming home not in defeat but in triumph, carrying the scars, wisdom, and hard-earned revelations of a life lived on the front lines of experience. His journey comes full circle, yet the line he first set in motion as a child continues its relentless march forward, drawing viewers into territories that are at once terrifying, exhilarating, and profoundly human. Paul Klee never expected this.