Picture these: Exposed ribcages and innards protruding from deathly thin and decaying bodies, a hodgepodge of skeletal bones and skulls, mutated monsters of every imaginable size and shape seemingly waiting to eat you up and chew you into pieces, sinister and macabre characters that’ll haunt you and send you shudders no end, and recently, black and vile vomit gushing from Hitler’s rancid mouth, a big-breasted grim reaper aboard a white horse chasing Rasputin the dog-man, a bald Santo Niño that looks a lot like Chucky from Child’s Play doing a Hitler salute, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s festering head.

Yes, disturbing, diabolical, and cult-like images such as these, which arguably win over the already predictable scare-factor of the Boogeyman or the manananggal, can only come from visual artist-writer Igan D’Bayan. And no, Igan is not in any way a spawn of some demonic monster or a Satanist (God forbid), if you are to ask—only that he is purely fascinated with the dark side and everything that it stands for or rather, everything that is related with it. Just how far his penchant for the dark side is, is seen in his atelier in San Juan. Entering his studio is like going inside a museum of forbidden objects, things that the fainthearted can’t just see lying around in an antiseptic room.

Once inside, you’d see a real skull of a cow attached to a painted mannequin’s body in one corner of the flat, a real goat skull appended to a torso made of fiber glass, an artificial human skull sitting atop the artist’s rattan table alongside recluse novelist Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a large black sculpture of an arachnid (its head a cast of a real human skull), Swiss artist H.R. Giger’s original biochemical sculpture, and huge canvases displaying the artist’s recurring whacked motifs.

Although Igan just started painting almost five years ago and is relatively new in the art scene, the 34-year-old Literature graduate has always wanted to be an artist when he was still a kid. “I started painting and drawing when I was five. At that time, I favored Dracula, monsters, and aliens as my subject matter,” Igan shares. He momentarily forgot about the visual arts when he pursued writing in college. There, at the University of Santo Tomas’ Faculty of Arts and Letter magazine The Flame, Igan first found the joys of writing about one of his passions—music.

Thinking that there weren’t too many options available for him after graduation and since a degree in Literature isn’t exactly what insurance agents are made of, he decided to become a writer. First, he spewed texts (not even words, according to him) for a “Cosmodemonic PR agency,” where he would write about washing machines with turbo-powered jet streams and refrigerators. Of course he wasn’t too happy with it. “I felt like a machine. But then I started writing for Pulp Magazine. That was the start of my so-called career,” he says. “But because words could not express what was in my head. I needed another outlet for what I was thinking. So I painted. I had my first show at the Crucible in 2005 and the rest is non-history.”

Igan’s thorough knowledge about literature proved to be a critical factor in his painting process.

Unlike other trained artists who approach the canvas, clearly conscious of the styles of, say, Picasso, Salvador Dali, or Francis Bacon, Igan advances to the canvas with a different perspective. Whereas others end up producing copycat artworks of master painters, Igan creates more substantive and very distinct opuses with the guiding influence of writers such as William Burroughs, Pynchon, and Jorge Luis Borges. “When I write, I try to be visual. When I paint, I try to be lyrical… It’s important for artists to read not just art books. When you read literature, you get to know about the human condition and the character of human beings. That is essential.  So if you read books, there’s more meat to be captured when you paint. You get emotions from reading a book that you now want to convey in a canvas,” he stresses.

As a result, central to Igan’s oeuvre is this plucky exploration of the human condition characterized by an overwhelming predilection for misery, destruction, disrepair, and decay—“all the fine things in life,” he sarcastically says. “I believe that human beings are doomed and screwed. Others might not share my beliefs, but I think we’re slowly decaying towards death. That’s why, if you notice, my figures have exposed ribcages and decaying skin because that’s essentially our condition,” he explains. “We’re not healthy all our lives. We’re slowly dying every day so that’s what I wanted to depict on the canvas.”

Isn’t that too pessimistic? “That’s the condition I see in human beings,” Igan reiterates without batting an eyelash, sounding as if no one could ever try to dissuade him. But poking the artist further, he tells us that the Draculas he drew as a child, his love for everything diabolical is an effect of his not-so normal and traumatic childhood. As he wasn’t too aware of how to justify the “evil” in his life in ways adults can, he reveals that he found a semblance of an analogy for it—in the horror movies and slasher films that he saw.

“I saw that evil operates in the movies so it must probably operate in ordinary life. I once had an exhibit about the traumas I had as a child, as a teen. My works there weren’t literal but metaphorical depictions of my experiences. It wasn’t like I painted a mother spanking a child on the butt. Instead, I painted creepy and scary versions of Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse,” he says.

Igan faithfully performs a ritual (not that ritual that you’re probably thinking) before proceeding to paint.

His consists of reading books and watching horror movies, art-house cinema, and B-movie flicks.

“Panalo eh!” he exclaims. “I also go around the city. There are so many things you see when you travel around Metro Manila. There’s so much ugliness in my life that I have no choice but to pick something beautiful, of course, I fail… I still end up painting the ugly. But I want to convey the philosophy that ugliness has a place in art, not just the beautiful. The scary can be oracular. You can get something out of being scared.”

And viewers are in for one hell of a bloodcurdling ride when they see Igan’s works. For those who appreciate something totally unpretentious, Igan’s controversial and apocalyptic pieces are surely a standout amongst the sickening field of flowers and nostalgic Filipiniana opuses usually found in some galleries today. They are a breath of fresh or putrid (whichever way you see it) air in the otherwise homogenized local art scene, whose value system is based on the number of awards an artist gets in his or her lifetime.  His are the stirring-ups we exactly need to jolt us out from, yes, living like brain-dead zombies. Igan tells, “I welcome reactions that are positive and negative. I welcome them all. If people are reacting to my work, it means they’re alive.”

Last year, Igan’s work titled “Gothika Filipina 2” (a gory and violent deconstruction of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and the artist’s take on a “despotic first couple imposing an iron-hand rule against the land while presenting themselves as a pair who has a divine mandate”) got censored in Malaysia.

What is supposed to be his first exhibit abroad became a letdown, for his painting didn’t make it to the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur for the Asian International Art Exhibition. “Censorship sucks!”

Igan emphatically discloses. “We all know that a painting is unreal. It’s still an illusion no matter how realistically it’s been done. A painting should be taken in its totality and not solely for the exposed vagina of one of the figures. I didn’t create a provocative work just for the sake of provocation. All I want to do is to paint the inexpressible. And what I want to express cannot be reduced to nostalgic paintings that match the couch, or abstract sculptures that complement the carpet,” he says.

Although Igan jokes that the purpose of his pieces is to scare the sh_t out of housewives, he seriously says that he paints for himself. “I still feel okay when my works don’t sell. It doesn’t mean that they suck. The buyer for it is not born yet. Eventually, ipapanganak din sila…kapag gunaw na ang mundo!” he teases.

And how has art changed this musician-writer-artist’s life? “I was able to buy more books,” he quips.

“No. My mother has a heart ailment. The money I earned in my first show, I gave her so she could buy medicines. All that from my paintings of ribcages and skulls. On another level, I’ve become more fearless. I realized that I no longer fear death because I conquered it in my art already. Why should I fear death if I paint it every day?” Dig that!

D’Bayan’s “Gothika Filipina 2: A One-painting exhibition” will be shown from Feb. 16-28 at the Crucible Gallery, 4/L SM Megamall A, Mandaluyong City. For details, call 635-6061.